Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update

by James R Knight

  Wanted poster for Clyde Barrow and Frank Clause, issued by the sheriff of Hill County, Texas, shortly after the killing of J. N. Bucher at Hillsboro, Texas, April 30, 1932. Frank Clause was Barrow’s partner in a string of home burglaries during 1928–29 but was not involved in the Bucher killing.

  —From the author’s collection

  On Saturday night, April 30, the three went back to Bucher’s store. The plan was to get there late so nobody else would be around, get Mr. Bucher to open up on some pretext, make a purchase with a large bill so he would have to open the safe for change, grab the goods, and run. Everything went as planned—up to a point. About 10:00 P.M., they got Mr. Bucher to open up and bought a 25 cent guitar string with a $10 bill. Mr. Bucher called his wife to open the safe, and then things started to go wrong. As soon as the safe was open, Ted pulled out a pistol and demanded the money, but Mr. Bucher had a pistol in the safe and pulled it also. Ted was faster and shot the old man in the chest. Johnny grabbed Mrs. Bucher, who was trying to pick up her husband’s gun, and Ted cleaned out the safe—$40 in cash, and jewelry worth about $1,500. When they got to the car, they told Clyde what had happened. According to Ted Rogers, Clyde said, “Damn! Now we’re in for it.”10 Those words would turn out to be a massive understatement.

  The killing of Mr. Bucher set off a manhunt around Hillsboro, but the Lake Dallas boys had already split up. Ted went his own way and was picked up on another charge within a month or so. The authorities never connected him with the Bucher killing. By the end of 1932, he was in Huntsville with Jack and Ralph. Jack introduced them to an old friend of his who was finishing up his sentence—Buck Barrow. It was there in Huntsville that Ted told them what really happened at Hillsboro.11

  In order to identify the killers of Mr. Bucher, the police in Hillsboro asked for help from the Dallas Sheriff’s Office, which sent down some mug shots for Mrs. Bucher to view. Clyde Barrow was well known in Dallas and, of course, his picture was there, along with his old partner, Frank Clause. Mrs. Bucher picked him out, probably because he had been there with the others the first time. The fact that the man present at the shooting that night was described as being five inches taller than Barrow—before Clyde’s mug shot was shown to Mrs. Bucher—was just a detail. The second man was another matter.

  Ted Rogers was not well known, but Raymond Hamilton was. He was an escaped prisoner and a wanted man even then. Rogers and Hamilton looked so much alike that it was the better-known Hamilton’s mug shot that was picked as the second man. Before he was through, Raymond Hamilton would richly deserve the punishment he got, but he was almost certainly in Michigan at the time Bucher was killed. Even so, he was eventually tried, convicted, and given a life sentence for Bucher’s murder.12

  With Bonnie in jail and most of his friends either locked up or scattered, Clyde kept a very low profile. He was now a wanted man also. Unfortunately, there is very little real evidence to show his movements during the months of May, June, and July 1932. He knew the amount of heat that was on because of the Hillsboro shooting. Being a burglar and a car thief was one thing, but a murder charge put Clyde in a different league. Clyde was identified, along with Frank Clause, in a couple of robberies at Lufkin, Texas, in early May, and his family seemed to believe the reports, but no one knew for sure. Mistaken identification by eyewitnesses was a fact of life—then as now—and it would happen over and over again during Bonnie and Clyde’s last two years.

  Clyde’s family continued to visit Bonnie in Kaufman and Buck in Huntsville during this time. Marie Barrow remembers being used to try on dresses for Bonnie. She was just fourteen, but she and Bonnie wore the same sizes in almost everything. Marie says that Clyde moved around a lot during May and June, keeping away from Dallas and staying with friends and relatives.13

  On June 17, 1932, the grand jury met in Kaufman. Bonnie claimed she was kidnapped and didn’t know either of the two men with her. The jury let her go, and she went back to Dallas with her mother. Mrs. Parker recalled that when the subject of Clyde came up Bonnie said, “I’m through with him. I’m never going to have anything more to do with him.” Just what her mother wanted to hear.14

  Little is known about Clyde Barrow’s whereabouts during May and June 1932. By the first of July, however, leads begin to surface. By most accounts, Clyde had gotten back together with Raymond Hamilton by this time. The date of Hamilton’s arrival back in Texas from Michigan, however, is open to question. Hamilton’s biographer gives two different time frames. First he says Ray arrived back in Dallas “several days after the Bucher murder.”1 Then he reports that, at Ray’s trial for the Bucher murder, a witness, J. W. Ringo, swore that Ray was in Michigan during April and May.2 Marie Barrow remembered late June as the time Clyde and Ray got back together.3

  As stated earlier, Marie Barrow believed that she was the main connection between the Barrow and Hamilton families up until this point, due to her friendship with Ray’s younger sister Audrey. Marie thought that Clyde and Ray teamed up for the first time in late June 1932.4 She didn’t know about Ray being in on the Simms Oil job or the Midwest bank robbery. Also, even though she and Blanche were good friends, Marie didn’t seem to know that Ray had tried to get in with Buck and Blanche when they were robbing payrolls in 1930–31. Blanche said they wouldn’t take him along, because he was too young (Ray was just seventeen in the summer of 1930) and because Buck didn’t like him or trust him.5

  Although Buck and Blanche wouldn’t work with Ray, Clyde worked with him during three periods, but their relationship was a stormy one. The first time ended when Ray refused to go along with the Eastham raid; the second time ended with the killing of one police officer, the kidnaping of another, and a near capture southwest of Houston; and the last time began when Clyde broke Ray out of Eastham and ended with Clyde claiming that Ray was stealing from the gang. For now, though (July 1932), both Clyde and Ray were wanted for murder, and each one needed a partner.

  During July, two Texas robberies were attributed to Barrow and Hamilton but are still disputed by some sources. One concerned an ice company at Palestine, and the other was a bank in Willis. Hamilton’s biographer says that Clyde and Ray did them both,6 but the Barrow family didn’t think so.7 Neither Ray’s biographer nor the Barrows offer any solid evidence, but the Home Ice Company robbery may be one of the earliest examples of someone trying to put the blame on Clyde and Raymond to cover their own tracks. On July 16, 1932, Roy Evans, the bookkeeper of the Home Ice Company in Palestine, claimed he was abducted and beaten, and the payroll stolen. Five days after the robbery, Evans admitted that he had made up the story of the robbery to hide the fact that he was embezzling funds.8 As for the Willis bank job, if the pair did that, they were in disguise. On July 27, 1932, two men walked into the First State Bank of Willis and walked out with $3,575.50. The two men were described as “about 30 years old, heavily whiskered, and dressed in overalls and khaki shirts.”9

  Probably the strongest argument for Clyde and Ray teaming up in late June is the fact that Bonnie left home at exactly that time, telling her mother that she had job as a waitress in Wichita Falls. Of course, Bonnie said nothing about Clyde in her letters home, but Mrs. Parker said she found out later that Bonnie, Clyde, and Ray had been living in a rented place in Wichita Falls all during July.10 On July 29, two men robbed the Interurban train station in Grand Prairie. They missed a $700 haul by an hour or so and got only a few dollars. This job is credited to Hamilton,11 but Ray’s biographer and the Barrow family say that Clyde was with him.12 Whether Barrow and Hamilton did any of these jobs, it is certain that by August, they were back in action.

  On August 1, 1932, Clyde dropped Bonnie off at the Star Service Station on Eagle Ford Road and told her to listen to the radio to hear if they made their getaway. He and Ray were going to rob the Neuhoff Brothers Packing Company. To help in the job, they had picked up another fellow, named Ross Dyer.13 Clyde and Ray would go inside and Dyer would drive the car. They hoped for a fair amount of money since it was
payday at the packing plant.

  It was 4:00 P.M. and Elsie Wullschleger was counting out the payroll in the plant’s office when the two young men came in. When she spoke to them, they pulled pistols and walked past her to the rear of the office, where Joe and Henry Nuehoff were working. “This is a holdup,” one of them said. The other took out a grocery bag and the $440 payroll disappeared inside. An old safe stood in the corner, and one of the bandits found a box inside, but it contained only some change used to buy stamps. Clyde and Ray backed out the door, went through the loading dock, and entered the waiting car. Before long they picked Bonnie up at the Barrows’ station and went to lie low at a place they used near Grand Prairie.14

  Four days later, Clyde dropped Bonnie off at the Barrow station again. She wanted to visit her mother but took a taxi from the Barrows’ home so her family wouldn’t know she was back with Clyde. Barrow, Ray Hamilton, and Ross Dyer planned to go north into Oklahoma, but Clyde told his mother he would meet her the next morning at a relative’s house. The boys were driving a car they had stolen in Corsicana, Texas. A fourth name, Everett Milligan, is mentioned in later news coverage, but this would turn out to be an alias used by Dyer.15

  Late on that Friday evening, the three of them were passing through Stringtown, Oklahoma, just north of Atoka, when they came upon a dance held at an outdoor pavilion. Music was provided by a group of teenagers including Ralph “Duke” Ellis, who remembers the car parking behind the stage near the band. He saw three men and said they took turns—one coming on the dance floor and two staying in the car.16 There are several versions of why they decided to stop and exactly how the trouble started, but it is certain that something about the group attracted the attention of Sheriff C. G. Maxwell.

  Around 11:00 P.M., Sheriff Maxwell and his undersheriff, Eugene C. Moore, approached the car where Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton were sitting. One of the men in the car (probably Hamilton) was taking a pull on a bottle of whiskey. “You four can consider yourselves under arrest,” Maxwell said, thinking they were just a bunch of bootleggers.17 He didn’t know that these young men were wanted for murder and a great many other things and would never come quietly. Clyde and Ray both picked up their pistols and started shooting, and both officers fell as the car started and pulled away. Maxwell was hit several times but emptied his pistol at them. Moore never even drew his gun. He died there behind the bandstand. He was thirty-one years old and left a wife and three small children.18 Clyde and Ray pulled out of their parking place and headed for the highway. Ross Dyer, who was on the dance floor at the time, was left on his own.

  The outbreak of gunfire pretty much closed down the dance for the evening. Duke Ellis says that there were other county and local lawmen present and that more gunfire was exchanged between Clyde and Raymond and other officers after Moore and Maxwell were shot. In the middle of all this, people were running in all directions. At least one bystander was hit in the shoulder, and another man hurt himself when he tried to jump a ditch and wound up straddling a barbed-wire fence. Ellis himself took cover in an old garage. After the shooting stopped, he emerged with his shirt covered in motor oil. One of his friends saw him and thought it was blood. They ripped off Ellis’ shirt, looking for the gunshot wounds, before they discovered their mistake.19

  Clyde and Ray ran, but they didn’t get far. Trying to drive onto the highway, they hit a culvert and turned over. They managed to crawl through the culvert and stole a car belonging to Cleve Brady, which they drove away to the east, along a country road that is today Highway 43. When Brady’s car lost a wheel, they appeared at John Redden’s house, saying they were in an accident and needed to get someone to the doctor. Redden’s son volunteered but soon found a gun in his ribs, and the group again headed east. Finally, in Clayton, Oklahoma, they took Frank Smith’s car and disappeared.20

  Clyde and Raymond drove all night, bypassing Dallas and abandoning the car in the small town of Grandview, south of the city. They picked up another car, and by 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning they were back at Clyde’s cousin’s house, where he had told his mother he would meet her.

  Cumie Barrow arrived at her nephew’s house the next morning and found Clyde and Raymond waiting for her. When she asked about Ross Dyer, Clyde said, “We lost him.” Clyde then asked his mother if she had seen the morning paper. She had. They discussed the Oklahoma shooting, but all Clyde would say was that he had never killed anyone. His mother found out the whole story later.21

  Meanwhile, some witnesses at Stringtown remembered a stranger who hitched a ride to the bus station and bought a ticket for McKinney, Texas. The police in Atoka called ahead, and the Texas authorities arrested him as he got off the bus. The Oklahoma newspaper identified him as Everett Milligan, and he was taken back to Atoka, then transferred to the state prison at McAllister for safekeeping.22 Milligan’s true identity was soon discovered. His record at the state prison shows that he was checked in on August 7, 1932, as Ross Dyer, alias Clifford Milligan.23 The Barrow family believed that Ross Dyer hopped a boxcar out of Oklahoma and returned to Texas, where he was picked up and gave police the names of Clyde and Raymond in exchange for his freedom, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.24 On August 12, 1932, Ross Dyer was transferred back to Atoka, Oklahoma, and charged with murder (case #4496). Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton were also charged the same day, their case number (4497) coming immediately after Dyer’s. At this point, Ross Dyer’s record ends. Apparently he was never brought to trial and eventually was released. Clyde and Raymond’s charges were not dropped until March 5, 1937, after they were both long dead.25

  Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton would forever protest their innocence in the killing of J. N. Bucher, the crime that first branded them both as killers, and technically they were right. Neither one of them actually pulled the trigger. Now, however, they had a killing they could truly call their own— they had irrevocably broken into the “bigtime.”26 Eugene Moore was the first of nine lawmen to die at the hands of that collection of outlaws that would become known as the Barrow gang.

  Clyde and Ray had gone back to Clyde’s cousin’s house because he had told his mother he would meet her there, but with all the attention they were sure to receive as soon as the police in Oklahoma identified them, they couldn’t stay. Clyde’s first priority was to pick up Bonnie from her mother’s house, but he didn’t dare go himself. After talking with his mother for a while, Clyde and Ray left to plan their next move.1

  Cumie went back to the Barrow service station and told the rest of the family what had happened. All the Barrows could do at that point was worry and wonder what would happen next. They knew it was too late for Clyde to ever live on the right side of the law. Marie remembered that this realization hit her and her brother L. C. especially hard. Clyde was the only one of their siblings they had really grown up with; he was the only one they knew as “big brother.” Now Clyde could never return home to live as he had in the past. Any contact with him would have to be quick and quiet. This sad state of affairs was confirmed when Clyde and Ray were identified as the shooters at Stringtown.2 The chase was on.

  The Barrow family followed the turn of events closely. It pained them that Clyde would be forever beyond the law, but they also felt extremely bad for those who were injured due to the things Clyde had done. His parents were hit hard when they heard about Eugene Moore.3 Like many lawmen Clyde would face in the coming months, Moore was not a trained or experienced professional. He had been undersheriff for a year and was just trying to make an honest dollar in hard times. He had grown up in Calera, Oklahoma, moved to Stringtown, married a local girl, and started a family. Moore was probably at the dance that night to make a little overtime, and now his wife was a widow and his three children fatherless—all because of Clyde.4

  Bonnie’s mother, Emma, said that she and Bonnie read about the Oklahoma shooting in the morning paper of August 6. Whatever she might have suspected, Emma Parker didn’t find out the truth until later. At the time, neither of
them knew that Clyde was involved, and Bonnie had planned to take an early bus back to Wichita Falls the next morning.5 This could well have been part of a plan she and Clyde agreed on before his trip to Oklahoma—“You visit with your momma, and I’ll meet you back in Wichita Falls in a couple of days,” he might have said. He and Bonnie had been staying there for the last month or so, after all. But everything had changed now. About 8:00 P.M., Emma and Bonnie were sitting on the front porch in the cool of the evening when a car pulled up in front of 2430 Douglas, driven by a man Emma didn’t recognize.6 Bonnie knew him, though. She went down and talked to him for a minute and then told her mother that she had a free ride to Wichita Falls. She gave Emma the money she had saved for bus fare and left.7

  For the next few days, Bonnie and Clyde hid out. According to his biographer, Hamilton separated from Bonnie and Clyde but kept in touch through his older brother Floyd.8 Whatever the truth, Marie Barrow believes it was Bonnie who decided their next move. They all knew they had to put some distance between themselves and north central Texas and Oklahoma, so Bonnie suggested a trip to visit an aunt she hadn’t seen in a while. This was Emma Parker’s sister, Millie Stamps, who lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, about 400 miles from the Dallas area and even farther from Oklahoma. It was the best idea anybody had come up with, so a few days later, Clyde, Bonnie, and Raymond headed west.

  This time, Bonnie and Clyde didn’t make any real mistakes. The trip to New Mexico should have been a smart move, but the timing was wrong. Just a few days before, it had been discovered that a large car theft ring was operating in that part of the state. Naturally, New Mexico law officers were now on the lookout for suspicious vehicles—and stolen cars were the only kind Clyde ever drove.9