Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update

by James R Knight

  Marie Barrow remembered that the Waco newspapers had a field day with this jailbreak, the local press referring to Clyde “Schoolboy” Barrow in some articles. The three boys were called “Baby Bandits” and “Baby Thugs,” in addition to the “Dumbbell Bandits” because of the fiasco in Middletown, Ohio.4

  Marie remembered reporters from Waco coming up to west Dallas to interview her parents, and that her mother had quite a bit to say in defense of her son. Cumie told the newsmen that Clyde was a good boy before he got involved with this Waco crowd through his acquaintance with Frank Clause. She said that Clyde’s involvement in the escape was unnecessary, due to the fact that he hadn’t gotten a severe sentence from his participation in the Clause-related burglaries. Even so, the family felt that, since Clyde’s escape from the Waco jail had involved a gun, several counts of car theft, interstate flight, armed robbery, and forcible recapture, he had likely forfeited any consideration of leniency that he may have gotten from the court, and they were right.

  The judge in Waco, who had allowed Clyde to serve his seven two-year sentences concurrently, saw no humor in his jailbreak and ruled that he could now serve the whole fourteen years. Clyde’s mother later took the case to the Texas Supreme Court, and eventually got the sentence reduced to the original two years.5

  Marie also remembered that, after returning from Waco, Bonnie continued to frequently visit her family. In fact, when Clyde’s mother was interviewed by some of the Waco newspaper reporters, Bonnie was there and her presence was noted in one of the printed accounts. Of course, they did not know that she was the one who had smuggled the gun into the Waco jail.

  Clyde and Bonnie regularly wrote each other for several weeks after Clyde was returned to Waco, but then her initially frequent letters began to taper off somewhat as she began to get involved with other boyfriends in west Dallas. Her visits to the Barrow house also became more and more irregular as her interest in Clyde seemed to fade. Then her letters to Clyde and her visits to the Barrow house stopped altogether. Marie later found out that Bonnie’s mother was pressuring her to end her relationship with Clyde due to his troubles with the law.6

  Clyde was finally on his way to the Texas State Prison at Huntsville, but there would be one more delay. Just as Clyde was arriving at Waco the first time, the prison board stopped all new arrivals. Severe crowding was given as the reason, but there were more serious problems. Governor Dan Moody had toured the prison in January and pronounced the conditions “not fit for a dog.”7 A new general manager, Lee Simmons, was hired, and on April 12 he began accepting new inmates. All this time, Clyde sat in the Waco jail. His time came on April 21 when the prison system’s famous transfer agent, Bud Russell, made a stop in Waco.8

  When Clyde entered the state prison system, he was processed like anyone else. He was given number 63527 and required to fill out the standard questionnaire. It will come as no surprise that he wasn’t entirely honest. He gave his birthdate as March 24, 1912, making him only eighteen instead of the actual twenty-one. He listed his middle name as “Champion” instead of the actual “Chestnut,” an error that would follow him through the works of several authors, and he listed Bonnie as his wife, which would allow her to write him. On physical examination, he was found to be 5'5½" tall and 127 pounds. He had three tattoos: a heart and dagger with the initials “EBW” for his old girlfriend Eleanor B. Williams; a shield with “USN”; and a picture of a girl’s head. He also said he didn’t smoke, drink, or gamble.9

  Clyde at first stayed at the main prison at Huntsville, known as “The Walls.” One reason was that there were still more bench warrants out on him for other things. Every so often, he would be taken out and sent to some court or other, but none of the charges ever stuck. The last trip out was back to Waco. On the return trip, in Bud Russell’s “one-way wagon,” Clyde struck up a conversation with another prisoner. He had been told he was going to be sent to a place called Eastham Farm. He wondered if the other prisoner knew anything about it. It turned out that the other young fellow knew quite a bit about Eastham Farm, but nothing Clyde heard was good news.

  It was September 18, 1930, when Clyde began his ride back to Huntsville from the court in Waco, and the other prisoner with him was Ralph Fults. At nineteen, Ralph was almost two years younger than Clyde, but he had much more prison experience. As a boy, Ralph had spent several years in the State Juvenile Training School at Gatesville, Texas. As an adult, he had just spent ten months at Eastham Farm, Camp 1 (June 1929–April 1930), escaped from solitary with three other men, and stayed at large until September, when he was captured in St. Louis. Now Ralph and Clyde were headed back to Eastham, where they had special treatment for escapees, and where Clyde Barrow’s criminal education was about to begin in earnest.1

  Barrow and Fults’ first stop was the main unit at Huntsville. Lee Simmons was the general manager of the whole operation, and W. W. Waid was the warden of “The Walls” unit. The prisoners stayed there only a few days and were then sent on to Eastham Camp 2, a few miles north of Huntsville near the town of Weldon. This camp was much the same as the older Camp 1, from which Fults had escaped, except there was no solitary at Camp 2. Instead, inmates were put outside in small sheet-iron boxes and the Texas sun did the rest. The buildings in which the prisoners were kept on the prison farms were not cellblocks like you would see on Alcatraz or at Leavenworth. These were dormitorylike arrangements with a big room full of bunk beds where the prisoners slept. There were no barred, individual cells, and meals were cooked and served outside.

  As they arrived, Clyde got his first good look at a favorite punishment method of the guards. It was called “riding the barrel,” and it was brilliantly, brutally simple. A man’s hands were handcuffed behind him and he was made to stand on an upended pickle barrel. He was told to stand there until further notice. After several hours, his legs became tired and numb, and eventually he fell off. He was then beaten for “disobeying” and put back on the barrel. After a few cycles, his attitude was considered “adjusted.” Clyde would have his turn on the barrel several times.

  When Barrow and Fults first lined up for work, Clyde saw a demonstration of another method used to control the inmates. The farm manager walked up to the new group, picked out a prisoner at random, and clubbed him to the ground. Fults told Clyde this was known as a “tune-up” and was used to psychologically intimidate the others. This was Clyde’s introduction to Eastham.2

  One of the mandates Lee Simmons received when he took the job of general manager was to put the prison on a paying basis. For this to happen, agricultural production had to increase, so the workload on inmates had increased. Although the guards figured Clyde for a “city boy,” he had grown up on farms and knew how to work cotton, but even experienced men were ground down by the back-breaking pace.

  Not long after they arrived at Camp 2, Clyde also witnessed what happened to an escapee who was brought back. He and Fults were working around a woodpile when they were surrounded by guards with shotguns. Ralph, of course, knew what was coming. A trusty had already told him that the guards had drawn straws for the honor of giving him his “welcome home” beating. Some of the guards held their guns on Clyde while the others kicked and pistol-whipped Fults to the ground.3 Fults told Clyde that this was what you got the first time. The second time you escaped and got caught, they killed you.4 It was about this time that Clyde began talking about coming back, after they got out, raiding the farm, and freeing as many prisoners as they could. It was an idea that Clyde never abandoned.5

  In addition to the regular guards, there were always additional mounted officers present when the men were working in the fields. They were meant to stay at a distance and were called “high riders.” They were picked for their marksmanship, since, if a prisoner ran, it was their job to stop him—permanently. The high riders also had a sort of pastime. If an inmate began to lag behind or seem to be loafing, they would ride him down and trample him with their horse. Fults said that one of them tried this
on Clyde, but, being raised with horses on the farm, he caught the reins and stopped the horse—and was almost shot for saving himself.6 Fults also said that he and Clyde once managed to maneuver a tree they were cutting down so that it fell on another inmate known to be an informer. They were sure they had killed him, but he proved tougher than they thought and survived with only a concussion.7

  A few days after the tree-felling incident, Clyde was suddenly transferred to Eastham Camp 1. Fults was sure it was because the authorities were concerned that he and Barrow were becoming too friendly. Even after the transfer, however, Ralph would occasionally hear how Clyde was doing, and he got to talk to him a few times when their work parties met. He says that it was at one of these meetings he first learned that Clyde had killed a man. Fults knew Clyde as well as anybody, and he believed the story was true.

  Clyde Barrow went into prison an experienced thief, but there was nothing to indicate that he had a talent for violence. Once inside, however, Clyde found out that violence was a fact of life at Eastham. When it came from the guards, there wasn’t much you could do about it, but when it came from another inmate, you had to make a choice—you could submit, or you could reply in kind—and that choice would probably determine your reputation in the prison population. It might also determine whether you survived. Clyde made his choice, and it taught him something important about himself—he could kill without hesitation in order to protect himself.

  Soon after Clyde got to Eastham Camp 1, he became the victim of a building tender called “Big Ed.”8 Ed, at over six feet tall and 200 pounds, had a weakness for young, small “schoolboy” types. Another inmate said Ed bought the “rights” to Barrow from the guards for three packs of cigarettes—prison’s universal currency. After that, Ed knew that he could do with Clyde as he pleased. Beatings and sodomy were his recreations of choice. Clyde couldn’t see any way out until another building tender, named Aubrey, approached him. Aubrey was a lifer who had nothing to lose. He hated Ed for his own reasons, and he had a plan.

  When Clyde Barrow entered the prison system, he really did have more in common with the young students Emma Parker thought he resembled than the violent, brutal men he would meet. If he was to live, however, that had to change. In Ralph Fults’ words, Eastham changed Clyde “from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake,”9 and dealing with Big Ed was a large part of that change.

  Aubrey’s plan was simple. One evening a few days later, Clyde waited until the other inmates had finished and then went alone into the toilet area at the rear of the barracks. Big Ed, unable to resist such an opportunity, followed, just as Clyde and Aubrey knew he would. It all happened quickly. Clyde stood at a urinal, and as Ed came up behind him, Barrow simply turned around and smashed him in the head with a length of pipe he had stolen to use as a weapon. Aubrey then came over, cut himself so it would look like a fight between the two building tenders, and stuck a knife in Ed’s chest. Clyde went back to his bunk and was never suspected. The guards either believed Aubrey’s story or, as the rest of the inmates believed, didn’t really care one way or the other. What the prisoners did to each other wasn’t their concern. Clyde never told the whole story to his family. He only told them he saw a lifer kill another prisoner.10

  In prison, there is always the challenge to keep yourself from retreating into your own world and allowing your situation to prey on your mind. Prisoners of war tell stories about how they dealt with the hours, days and years of captivity and brutality by inventing games in their head, or planning houses or solving math problems—anything to keep their minds active. Clyde kept his mind on his family and Bonnie back home. He planned his revenge on the system, the raid on the farm that he and Fults had talked about, and the rest of the time he had to watch his back from the likes of Big Ed and the guards. This was plenty to keep his mind sharp. The larger challenge was physical. The inmates would get up in the morning and run the two miles or so to the fields, work the crops or clear brush in the woods for the next ten to twelve hours, and then run the same two miles back to the barracks.11 Add to this the occasional beating by a guard or sessions on the pickle barrel, and just surviving the experience became a real victory.

  Bonnie had written Clyde for the first few months he was inside, but then the letters slowed down and finally ended. For some reason, she began again just before Christmas, 1930. Clyde was glad to hear from her and answered her letter right away. He tried to encourage her that he wouldn’t be in jail forever. He knew all about his mother’s efforts to get the fourteen years reduced back to the original two, and he hoped she would wait for him.12

  Clyde survived the next year, 1931, but there was no word on his sentence. Although communication between Clyde and Bonnie had again decreased substantially as 1930 turned into 1931, Clyde always wrote to his mother, trying to put the best possible light on his miserable circumstances. One of his letters, dated December 3, 1931, and mailed from Camp No. 1, Route 16, Weldon, Texas, illustrates his outlook:

  Dear Mother—

  Will drop you a few lines to let you know I haven’t forgotten you.

  Say, what is wrong? I haven’t had a letter from you in over a week. I have been worried about you all. This leaves me OK, except a little cold. Well, how is everything in big Dallas by now? It is raining down here and has been for three days. How is little Marie and L. C. and have you got your station fixed up yet? I sure wish I was there to help you. After you get everything going okay, Papa should build him a little place and handle used auto parts. You can buy them for a song. Well how is Elvin and ———? (Jack Barrow’s wife’s name).13 I sure would like to see you all. Have you heard anything from Blanche or not?

  Be sure and make her bring you down here and another thing, it isn’t long until Xmas, so remind them all of that old cake and chicken. Well, mother, I don’t know any news. So will close for this time, hoping to hear from you real soon. Your loving son,

  [signed] Clyde Barrow14

  Clyde’s mention of Blanche in his letter was really a veiled reference asking how Buck was doing. He could hardly mention his fugitive older brother by name, since these letters were screened by the prison authorities. Ironically, while Clyde’s escape was short and violent, Buck simply drove away and was free for almost twenty-two months. During this period of time, Buck and Blanche had gotten married in Oklahoma and were trying to make a life for themselves.

  The Barrow family felt that Blanche’s influence on Buck was extremely good. To them, Buck seemed to be trying to live up to the good intentions stated in his letters from prison: “to lead a worthwhile life in the future and to be a man that the people will respect and that my relatives will honor.” Despite this, the fact that he was still an escaped convict hung over everyone’s head like a dark cloud. Mr. Caldwell, Blanche’s father, tried to convince Buck to go back to prison to finish paying his debt to society, and Blanche took up the same theme. Whenever Buck and Blanche went back through Dallas to visit, his mother added her voice and tried to talk Buck into peacefully going back to the Ferguson farm, finishing his sentence, and then living an upstanding life afterward.

  That was certainly what the Barrow family thought in late 1931. The problem was, as in so many incidents involving Buck and Clyde, there were things that the family didn’t know. Buck had indeed settled down with Blanche in Oklahoma, but he had not given up his criminal career. He had just gotten more careful. Over fifty years later, Blanche told author John Neal Phillips that Buck committed a number of robberies in 1930 and 1931. She knew all about it and even went with him for many of them. A teenager from west Dallas asked to go along on some of the jobs with Buck and Blanche, but they thought he was too young. They also didn’t trust him. His name was Raymond Hamilton.15

  Hamilton was born in Oklahoma on May 21, 1913, and like the Barrow boys had moved to west Dallas in the early 1920s. His mother and father divorced, and his mother remarried to a man named Steve Davis. Davis knew the Barrow boys and was involved with them in poultry rustling, among other
things, in the 1920s. Raymond was the same age as Clyde’s younger brother L. C. and, in spite of Marie Barrow’s statements to the contrary, probably knew the Barrow boys growing up in west Dallas.16 Considering Buck and Blanche’s attitude toward him during 1930–31, Raymond probably didn’t work with the Barrows until Clyde got out of prison in 1932.

  When the Barrows moved to Eagle Ford Road and set up their service station, there was a good well on the property. Henry Barrow used to make a little extra money by selling water from the well at 25 cents a barrel. Marie remembers Raymond’s mother buying water from her father, and this was how she first met the Hamilton family. Marie Barrow was about the same age as Raymond Hamilton’s younger sister Audrey, and the two girls ran around together as teenagers in the early 1930s. While Marie considered Audrey Hamilton one of her best friends, she had a different opinion about Audrey’s brother. Over sixty years later, Marie’s comment to one of her friends was very brief: “Ray Hamilton was a punk.”17

  Shortly after Clyde wrote his letter on December 3, 1931, family pressures on Buck finally paid off. Buck said he would surrender to the prison authorities at Huntsville, as long as he could spend Christmas on the outside. His family agreed with this condition, and he spent the holiday with his relatives. On December 27, 1931, Buck, Blanche, Cumie, Artie, Artie’s husband, and Marie drove down to the main building in Huntsville for Buck’s reintroduction to prison life. It wasn’t the happiest of occasions, but everyone knew that it was necessary for Buck and Blanche to have any kind of a real future together. They went to Warden Waid and told him that Buck wanted to finish up his term. Buck asked that he be kept at The Walls because the bullet wounds that put Buck in the prison hospital back in early 1930 were still bothering him.