The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws (16 page)

Bonnie smoked cigarettes, but that cigar bit folks like to tell about is phony. I guess I got that started when. I gave her my cigar to hold when I was making her picture. I made most of them pictures the laws picked up when we fled Joplin, Missouri, leaving everything in the apartment except the guns. I seen a lot of them pictures in the newspapers afterward — Them little poems Bonnie made up made the papers, too. She would think up rhymes in her head and put them down on paper when we stopped. Some of them she kept, but she threw a lot of them away.

Bonnie and Clyde were probably certain of their ultimate fate, but they almost certainly relished their fame and publicity at the same time. In April 1934, Henry Ford received a letter purportedly authored by Clyde thanking the famous car maker for producing Clyde’s favorite kind of car:

Mr. Henry Ford

Detroit Mich.

Dear Sir: —

   While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8 —

Yours truly

Clyde Champion Barrow

While it’s still unclear whether Clyde actually wrote that letter, historians and analysts believe that the spelling errors can be explained by his lack of education, and there’s no doubt Clyde was a big fan of the V-8. Others believe that the handwriting of the letter resemble Bonnie’s handwriting. Of course, if Clyde didn’t author it, the letter was a clear example of Clyde’s notoriety, and a short time afterward Ford received a letter purported to be from John Dillinger (though the Dillinger letter was later proven to be a fraud).

However, the publicity came at a cost. With the published photos plastering their faces on newspapers across the nation, it became more and more dangerous for anyone from the gang to appear in public. For that reason, the gang was constantly on the move, and over the next three months they worked their way from Texas to Minnesota, stopping along the way in Lucerne, Indiana in May to try to rob a bank.  Though they failed in that job, they succeeded a little while later in Okabena, Minnesota. As a result of their frequent travels, the Barrow Gang got credit for crimes they didn’t actually commit, while false sightings in places they were far away from also became common. Jones recounted one example:

Some of the tales about us robbing banks all the time ain’t true, either. The time I was with Clyde and Bonnie, we never made a bank job. He liked grocery stores, filling stations and places there was a payroll. Why should we rob a bank? There was never much money in the banks back in them days in the Southwest. But that’s not the way the papers put it. They’d write we was heisting a bank in Texas when we was actually off in Tennessee or somewhere else. I remember one time we stopped at a tourist court in a little town. I went across the road to an inn to get some sandwiches. The waiter was all excited. “Bonnie and Clyde was just here,” he told me. “They stopped for gas. The police come out, but they got here too late. Bonnie and Clyde was already gone and they couldn’t catch them.” It shook me some when he said that, but I stayed calm.

I took the food back to the tourist cabin and told Clyde what the man had said. He got a good laugh out of that, but after we had eat, he said, “You know, that man might have been giving us a tip. He might have recognized us. We better move on.”

Eventually, Henry Methvin had joined the gang, and Methvin would prove to be the “weak link” in the chain that would eventually break.

Methvin’s mugshot

While the American public was fascinated by the notion of young lovers on the run, the Barrow Gang faced a much starker reality. Because they now lived in constant fear of being recognized, the Barrow Gang no longer ate in restaurants or slept in motels.  Instead, they camped in the woods outside of towns, cooked their meals over make shift fires and bathed in cold, shallow streams. On top of all that, the gang constantly had to steal new cars. As Jones later explained:

Clyde drove most always, ‘cause he didn’t trust nobody else to drive like he could. As for me working on the car, I’d change a tire or a battery or something like that. But we’d junk a car if anything went wrong with it and get another one. I don’t know how many cars I stole for Clyde. I do remember we never kept one more than a week or so, because it’d get too hot…

We never stayed long in one place. It was too risky. We had to keep moving. When our clothes got dirty, we’d take them to a cleaners if we thought it was safe. But we didn’t wait until they was ready. We’d drive on somewhere else and, in a week or two, swing back to pick them up, if there was no heat behind. Sometimes we never got back. We’d buy new clothes.

Any shopping we done was done alone. Me and Clyde would wait in the car down the street while Bonnie went in and got what she wanted. Or he would go in a store while we waited out in the car.

I always figured some of them reporters was holed up somewhere with some booze during the time they claimed they’d been off with the law in hot pursuit of the outrageous Barrow gang. They was just writing from their imagination, it seemed to me. I couldn’t read what they was saying in the papers then, but we’d pick up the newspaper in whatever little town we was traveling through and Bonnie would read it aloud. That way, we kept up with where the law thought we was and we’d head in the opposite direction.

These conditions, along with the fact that the five members spent most of their days riding around in cars lacking air conditioning, made life very unpleasant for everyone. Jones noted that the passengers often rode for hours in complete silence:

There was never a whole lot of talk among us when we was on the road. Often what seemed like hours of silence would be broken as Clyde looked at her and said something like, “Honey, _ as soon as I find a place, I’m gonna stop. I’m tired and want to get some rest.” He always called her “Honey” or “Baby” and she called him “Daddy” or “Honey.” They called me “Boy.” I got to where I called Bonnie “Sis” and Clyde “Bud.” We couldn’t say each other’s names, because somebody at a filling station or a tourist court might pick up on them and call, the ‘law.

Bonnie was always agreeable with Clyde, but they did have some fallings out. I’ve seen them fall out over a can of sardines. He jerked it out of her hands and opened it with his pocketknife, and her trying to tell him it had an opener. But I never heard them call each other bad names. They hardly ever used dirty words. I’ve heard today’s teenagers use words worse than Clyde and Bonnie, and they was deadly outlaws.

Sometimes, when she got puffed up about something, Clyde would kid her and say, “Why don’t you go on home to Momma, baby? You probably wouldn’t get more than ninety-nine years. Texas hasn’t sent a woman to the chair yet, and I’d send in my recommendation for leniency.” She’d laugh at him then and everything would be smooth again.

Jones ultimately reached the point that he couldn’t stand the confinement anymore and stole a car to get away from everyone.  However, the loneliness soon changed his mind, and he returned to the gang on June 8, 1933.

Two days later, perhaps while drinking, arguing or both, Clyde flipped the car that he, Bonnie and Jones were riding in.  While he and Jones walked away unscathed, Bonnie’s leg was very badly burned.  The two men managed to get Bonnie to a nearby farm, where a Mrs. Pritchard examined the leg, saw that it was burned to the bone near the knee and insisted that they needed to call a doctor.  When Clyde seemed reluctant, Mr. Pritchard became suspicious and slipped away to call the police.  Upon noticing his host was missing, Clyde picked up the crying Bonnie and, with Jones on his heels, ran out the door, jumping in Pritchard’s car and driving away.

From there they drove to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where they got a room in a tourist court.  Clyde finally agreed to bring in a doctor, who insisted that Bonnie needed round the clock nursing.  Unable to risk taking her to a hospital, he hired a private nurse to care for her.  He also contacted Bonnie’s sister, Billie Jean, who travelled from Texas to help care for her sister.

In need of quick money, Buck Barrow and Jones attempted and failed to rob a local bank in Alma, Arkansas, killing Marshal Henry Humphrey in the process.  This brought out every lawman in the area, and forced the group to go on the run again, dragging the nearly delirious Bonnie with them. According to Jones, “Bonnie never got over that burn. Even after it healed over, her leg was drawn under her. She had to just hop or hobble along. When she was so bad at first, we had to carry her to the toilet and take her off when she finished and put her back in bed.

“If a policeman is killed in Dallas

And they have no clue or guide

If they can’t find a fiend, just wipe the slate clean

And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.

There’s two crimes committed in America

Not accredited to the Barrow Mob

They had no hand in the kidnap demand

Nor the Kansas City Depot job.”

The Red Crown Tourist Court

The gang’s next stop was the Red Crown Tourist Court in Platte City, Missouri, where they rented both the small brick cabins available on July 19, 1933.  Unbeknownst to them, the tavern by the same name, located just across the street, was a favorite hang-out for Missouri Highway Patrolmen.  Still, had they behaved themselves, they might have avoided notice, but just like in Joplin, the Barrow Gang proved incapable of avoiding notice.

Blanche made the first mistake by strolling into the tourist court office wearing riding breeches and registering only three people.  The owner of the tourist court, Neal Houser, knew that the average woman driving with her family through Missouri did not wear riding breeches.  On top of that, when he looked out the window, he saw clearly that more than three people were getting out of the car, including what appeared to be crippled women being carried. Furthermore, Houser also also noticed that they backed their car into the driveway, as if ready to make a quick get-away.  The gang also paid for both their lodging and five meals each day with coins instead of bills, and with all that Houser was thoroughly suspicious.  However, the icing on the cake was that they covered all the windows, which were already curtained, with sheets of newspaper.  Houser decided to stroll across the street and mention his unusual guests to one of the Highway Patrolmen, Captain William Baxter, who was drinking coffee at the tavern.

In the meantime, local Sheriff Holt Coffey received word that the infamous Bonnie had been injured and that the gang was on the run again.  So when the local druggist called and told him about some suspicious looking characters who had come by to purchase bandages and atropine sulfate (used for treating burns), he decided to put a man near the tourist court to see what was going on.  He also contacted Baxter, who agreed that this might be the real deal.  Together they planned a raid, sending to nearby Kansas City for reinforcements and an armored car.  

The same night the gang arrived, at 11:00 p.m., Coffey, Baxter and their men surrounded the cabins, sending an officer to bang on the door and order everyone out.   Instead, all three men began firing out the doors and windows.  Much to the gang’s surprise, the “local yokels” they expected returned fire with submachine guns, forcing them to take cover on the floor.  Buck, refusing to take cover, attempted to fire back and was hit in the head by two rounds.

Clyde carried the unconscious Bonnie to the garage and threw her in the back seat of the car while Jones checked outside for an escape route.  Clyde went back and grabbed Buck while Jones fired on the armored car blocking them in. The driver pulled out of the line of fire, allowing the gang to shoot its way out and escape. During the chaos, Jones had been shot in the shoulder, and Blanche had been blinded by shards of glass that struck her in both eyes.

With four moaning, injured people in the car, Clyde drove through the dark night.  Five days later they made camp in a disused amusement park in Dexter, Iowa, but their presence was soon noted by local citizens, who alerted the police. This time, the police called on every man in the community who could fire a gun to help surround the five and open fire.  While Bonnie, Clyde and Jones were able to escape, they left the dying Buck behind, along with Blanche.  Buck died a few days later, and Blanche was later convicted as an accessory to murder and served ten years in prison.

The arrest of Blanche Barrow

Still determined to live long enough to complete his revenge, Clyde dragged the injured Bonnie and W.D. northwest to Colorado, then back to Minnesota and then south again to Mississippi, pulling mostly small jobs so that they had spending money. One notable exception was when the three robbed the armory in Plattville, Illinois, taking with them three new Browning Automatic Rifles, a number of handguns and as much ammunition as they could carry.

After six weeks on the run, the trio returned to Dallas in September to visit their families.  It seems that by now Bonnie and Clyde knew that the end was near, and in a way the trip seemed like one last chance to come home to say good bye. By now, Jones had had enough, and he left with their permission to visit his mother and not return:

“I left Clyde and Bonnie after they was healed up enough to get by without me. Clyde put me out to steal a car and I hooked ‘em back to Texas.

I’d had enough blood and hell.

But it wasn’t done yet. I had to pay. A boy in Houston, where I was working for a vegetable peddler, knowed me and turned me in to the law. They tried me for killing a sheriff’s man at Dallas. Clyde done it, but I was glad to take the rap. Arkansas wanted to extradite me, and. I sure didn’t want to go to no Arkansas prison. I figure now that if Arkansas had got me, one of them skeletons they’ve dug up there might have been me.”

As Jones indicated, he was quickly arrested in Houston, on November 16. He would hear about the final demise of Bonnie and Clyde from a jail cell.

Leaving Bonnie with her family, Clyde went about the Texas countryside, executing small time robberies with the help of local hoodlums who were excited to get to pull a job with the notorious Clyde Barrow.  On November 22, he took Bonnie with him to Sowers, Texas to visit some more family members, but Dallas Sheriff Smoot Schmid got wind of their plans and ambushed the two, firing on their car.  While they got away, they were both shot in the legs by a single bullet from a BAR.  A few days later, a Dallas grand jury would finally indict Bonnie for the murder of Deputy Malcolm Davis. Though Bonnie was often portrayed in the media as the mastermind and the cold-blooded killer in the group, Jones claimed that it was quite the opposite: “Bonnie was the only one Clyde trusted all the way. But not even Bonnie had a voice in the decisions. His leadership was undisputed. She always agreed with him when he ‘ hinted he might like to hear her advice on something. As far as I know, Bonnie never packed a gun. Maybe she’d help carry what we had in the car into a tourist-court room. But during the five big gun battles I was with them, she never fired a gun. But I’ll say she was a hell of a loader.”

The two spent the month of December laying low, perhaps hoping to spend what they might have sensed would be their last Christmas quietly.  However, they started 1934 off with a bang, both literally and figuratively, when Clyde finally attacked the Eastham State Prison.  On January 16 he sprung his friends Raymond Hamilton and Henry Methvin from the hell-hole that had been the source of so much of his pain.  In the process, he killed a prison officer, Major Joe Crowson.  

There is a reason for the old saying “don’t mess with Texas” and Clyde’s attack on the prison brought the force of the entire Lone Star State down on his head, in addition to all the federal officials who were already looking for him.  The Texas Department of Corrections brought one of the most famous Texas Rangers in history, Captain Frank A. Hamer, out of retirement to go after what was left of the Barrow Gang.  Hamer was the perfect man for the job, unafraid to kill anyone that might harm a fellow Texan.  According to his record, he had personally sent more than 50 criminals to their graves and had been wounded 17 times in the process.  Unlike some others in the organization, he made it clear that he would have no problem firing on Bonnie Parker, even though she was a woman.  

Beginning on February 10, 1934, Hamer had one purpose:  capture Bonnie and Clyde, dead or alive.  

Hamer