Bonnie’s mother said her sister told her what happened. She said that the three kids arrived at Millie’s farm outside Carlsbad on Saturday the 13th of August and spent the night. Bonnie’s aunt had a huge garden, large enough to supply her family’s needs and even stock a nearby vegetable stand that was regularly patronized by many of the local residents. The next morning, someone suggested that they should make a batch of homemade ice cream. Clyde and Ray were willing to crank the freezer, but they had no ice, so Ray offered to drive into Carlsbad and buy some. As Ray drove through town, Deputy Sheriff Joe Johns noticed the car, which matched the description of one reported stolen. When Ray came back by, Johns followed him out to Millie’s farm.10
This, at least, is the story Emma Parker heard from her sister and the one Johns told the newspapers. The Barrow family believed otherwise. Marie said the family initially thought that the run-in between Clyde and Deputy Joe Johns was indeed an accidental meeting due to the lawman noticing the stolen car. Later, she says, they learned that the contact between the three kids and the deputy sheriff was instigated by Bonnie’s aunt. Emma Parker said her sister had no idea Clyde or Ray were wanted for anything,11 but Marie said the Barrow family eventually found out that Aunt Millie saw Bonnie handwashing some bloodstained clothing (or caught a glimpse of some of Clyde’s guns) and grew scared. The Barrows don’t say how they got that information, and Millie—at least through her sister Emma—denied it, so the question remains unresolved. Whatever the cause, a few minutes after Ray got back from town that Sunday morning, Eddy County Deputy Sheriff Joe Johns was knocking on Aunt Millie’s front door.
Bonnie answered the door and saw a police officer standing there. “Whose Ford is this?” he asked. The little waitress was by now a veteran and didn’t give her surprise away. “Oh, the car belongs to one of the boys. They’re dressing—I’ll send them out in a minute,” she said. This sounded perfectly normal but was a prearranged signal to Clyde and Ray that the law was there.12 While he was waiting, Johns decided to take a closer look at the car, but it was locked.
This was an unusual situation for Clyde and Ray. Normally, Clyde was never more than arm’s length from a firearm of some kind, but in order not to alarm Bonnie’s aunt, all their artillery was now locked in the trunk of the car the deputy was examining. Finally they found a shotgun in a closet, went out the back door, and got the drop on Johns. The paper said that Johns actually went for his gun until Clyde fired a charge of bird shot over his head, knocking off his hat.13
The visit with Aunt Millie had lasted just one day. By shooting the hat off a deputy sheriff in Bonnie’s aunt’s front yard, the trio had already worn out their welcome. Once again they had to go, but this time they decided to take the lawman with them. They quickly gathered up their things and drove off with Deputy Johns toward Texas. By that night, they were about 500 miles away in San Antonio. The time they took to get there was reported variously as between eight14 and thirteen hours.15 By then, the alarm had been out for several hours and several leads had surfaced. By coincidence, two truck drivers discovered the decapitated body of a man about this same time. It was easy to turn “His hat was shot off” into “His head was shot off,” so for a while this body was thought to be Johns. Actually, Clyde drove around San Antonio, unsuccessfully looking for a new car to steal, and then released Deputy Johns outside of town. He phoned his office to say he was all right, just tired and a long way from home.16
Bonnie, Clyde, and Raymond surfaced late Monday afternoon, the 15th, when they stole a Ford V-8 sedan in Victoria, Texas, southeast of San Antonio. This must have been noticed quickly and their probable route guessed, because, for the first time, the police actually got ahead of them. The Colorado River runs just west of Wharton, Texas, and a couple of local deputies decided to stake out the highway bridge and watch for the stolen cars. The one on the west end of the bridge would make the identification and signal the one on the east end with a flashlight.
It was well after dark when the outlaws approached Wharton on their way to Houston. The first lawman saw them coming, but when he flashed the signal to his partner, he inadvertently signaled Clyde too. As soon as he saw the light blink on, Clyde, with Bonnie beside him, spun the wheel and downshifted, doing a 180-degree turn in the middle of the road and driving back past an astonished Raymond Hamilton, who was following in the second car. Ray tried the same thing but was much closer to the bridge by the time he got turned around, so he received the bulk of the officers’ attention. They opened up on Ray’s sedan, but he was uninjured. The two cars quickly disappeared back west down the highway and vanished into the Texas night.17
After the marathon trip from New Mexico, two days without sleep, and a near-death experience at Wharton, Ray Hamilton decided he’d had enough of the glamorous outlaw life for a while. As for Bonnie and Clyde, for all the law knew, they might as well have fallen off the edge of the earth.
In four months, Clyde had gone from a littleknown local hood to the most wanted outlaw in Texas. Before April 1932, Bonnie Parker had no police record at all. Now her name and Clyde’s were forever linked.
In the late summer and fall of 1932, Bonnie and Clyde hit the bigtime, at least in the Southwest. In April, they were virtually unknown to the general public. Now they were suspected of almost every bank, gas station, or grocery store holdup, and of taking every car that was stolen in Texas and several surrounding states. In the newspapers, Clyde’s driving skills reached heroic proportions, so that the pair could be credited with two robberies several hundred miles apart on the same day. Other thieves began to copy their modus operandi, such as it was, in hopes of being misidentified as the famous pair and escaping blame themselves. Such was the price of fame. The two lovers also began to acquire a glamorous allure. Their families, however, knew the truth.
After their misadventures in New Mexico and the ambush at Wharton, Texas, the three kids headed back toward Dallas. They came to rest at an abandoned farmhouse near Grand Prairie and stayed there for almost two weeks. Clyde and Bonnie visited their families in west Dallas frequently from this hideout.1
While Bonnie and Clyde recuperated at Grand Prairie, Raymond decided to go back to Michigan. Hamilton felt it was time to go to a “cooler” climate, in terms of both weather and police pursuit. Clyde and Bonnie knew they needed to get away too, so they agreed to drive Ray to Bay City, leaving about the first of September.2
Until now, Bonnie and Clyde had been the concern of two or three southwestern states, but this trip would bring them to the attention of the U.S. government agency that would later become the FBI. None of the offenses Clyde was accused of at this point, including the two murders, were federal crimes. It was up to individual states to catch him—if they could. Still with so many serious charges already against him, the federal charge came almost as an anticlimax.
Bonnie and Clyde delivered Raymond to his father in Bay City, Michigan, probably by the second week of September, and then set out on their own. Later that same month, a stolen Ford was found abandoned near Jackson, Michigan, 100 miles south of Bay City. The Ford came from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and a check with the Pawhuska police found that another stolen Ford, from Illinois, was abandoned there. Federal agents discovered in the Illinois Ford an empty medicine bottle and eventually traced it to Clyde Barrow’s aunt. Further investigation implicated Bonnie and Clyde as well as Clyde’s brother L. C. in the theft of the Illinois Ford. Eight months later, on May 20, 1933, they were finally charged with interstate transportation of a stolen car—a federal offense.3
Exactly where Bonnie and Clyde spent the next month or so is not known, but the family said that they kept in touch via a series of unsigned letters as they traveled through the Midwest, living off the proceeds of grocery store and gas station robberies.4 By the first of October, according to the Barrow family, Bonnie and Clyde were in the Kansas City area.5 The three Texas desperadoes had separated and managed to lie low for over a month, but the calm period was about over. On October
8, 1932, a young man walked into the First State Bank at Cedar Hill, Texas, and robbed it of $1,400. Ray Hamilton was back in Texas and back in business.6 Three days later, there was a killing in Sherman, Texas. The law said Clyde Barrow did it, but the question is still open to this day.
Wanted poster, Clyde Barrow, October 24, 1933. Issued by the Department of Investigation, forerunner to the FBI, for Barrow’s only federal crime—interstate transportation of a stolen car.
—Courtesy of Sandy Jones–The John Dillinger Historical Society
At 6:30 Tuesday afternoon, October 11, a young man walked into Little’s Grocery at the corner of Vaden Street and Wells Avenue in Sherman, Texas. He was about 5'6", 130 pounds, cleanshaven and light-complexioned. He wore a gray felt hat, tan lumber jacket, and dark pants. He looked to be twenty to twenty-five years old. Mr. Little, the owner of the store, had left only minutes before with most of the day’s receipts, and two other employees were closing for the day. The young man picked up a loaf of bread as he approached Homer Glaze, who was at the cash register. To the bread he added a half-dozen eggs, and then he asked Howard Hall, who was behind the meat counter, for a dime’s worth of lunch meat. He gave Glaze a dollar bill, but as soon as the till was opened, he pulled a pistol.
As the robber was taking about $60 from the register, Hall came out from behind the meat counter and said, “Young man, you can’t do that!” The thief said he would show Hall what he could do and ordered Hall and Glaze toward the door that opened out onto Wells Avenue. He seemed to take his anger out on Hall, pushing and kicking him all the way. Finally, at the door, he hit Hall in the head, knocking his glasses out into the street. At this point, the butcher made a grab for the gun and the bandit started shooting. Hall went down on the sidewalk with two bullet wounds. A third shot missed. The bandit then put a fourth shot into Hall as he lay on the ground. Homer Glaze ran out of the store to help his friend and the shooter turned on him. Glaze would have been left bleeding on the sidewalk too, except that, instead of a fifth shot, the pistol snapped. The young man then turned and ran past Mrs. L. C. Butler, who had seen the whole thing, and down Wells for a block finally turning onto Hazelwood. Two boys saw two men get into a large black sedan and drive away. Howard Hall was taken across the street to St. Vincent’s Sanitarium, where he died an hour later. He was fifty-seven years old and left a widow, one son, one brother, and two sisters.
By October 13, thanks to mug shots sent up from Dallas, Clyde Barrow had been identified as the killer of Howard Hall.7 In addition to Homer Glaze’s identification, Walter Enloe, a Grayson County deputy sheriff, claimed that Clyde had entered the county jail earlier on the day of the shooting to visit his brother, L. C., who was a prisoner there.8
Clyde Barrow is generally associated with twelve murders during his two years on the run (the killing of Big Ed when he was in prison would make thirteen, and there was a fourteenth, which will be discussed later). He can be shown to have been a shooter, or at least present and therefore an accessory, in ten of them. Of these ten, there is a real possibility that he could have actually fired the fatal shot in seven cases. An eleventh killing, the shooting of Alma, Arkansas, City Marshal Henry Humphrey, will later be shown to actually have been the work of Clyde’s brother Buck, with Clyde not present. The only murder attributed to Clyde Barrow in which his participation remains in any serious doubt today is the killing of Howard Hall, just described. How does the evidence stack up?
Clyde is placed at the scene of the crime as Hall’s killer only by Homer Glaze’s identification of him from a Dallas mug shot. Glaze got a very good look at the killer and gave a detailed description to police before seeing any photos. In spite of that, any policeman or attorney will tell you how reliable eyewitness testimony and identification involving high-stress situations really is. The accurate identification of a face seen over the barrel of a gun as you fear for your life is not as easy as it sounds.
Clyde Barrow, Raymond Hamilton, W. D. Jones, Ted Rogers, and many other criminals of similar age and description were routinely misidentified, mistaken for each other, and their pictures mislabeled in newspapers and magazines. In the killing of J. N. Bucher, Clyde was identified even though he wasn’t inside the store but outside in the car. Ted Rogers, who later admitted shooting Bucher, was identified as Raymond Hamilton, who was later convicted of the crime. Clyde was identified by several eyewitnesses in northwest Arkansas as a party to the killing of a lawman and the rape and assault of a housewife, although the bulk of the evidence indicates that he was not present in either case.
The only other identification comes from Deputy Sheriff Walter Enloe. He said that Barrow walked into the county jail at noon on the day of the shooting and asked to visit L. C. Barrow, who was a prisoner there. Enloe said he recognized Barrow from wanted posters. This would, at least, put Barrow in Sherman and not in Kansas, as he later claimed to his family.9
Clyde Barrow’s involvement in the killing of Howard Hall rests entirely on these two eyewitness reports—one that puts him in the area on the same day, and another that puts him at the scene. Over the years, a version of the event that features a blond woman waiting in a car at the curb for the killer— indicating that Bonnie was involved as well—has been put forward, but it has no support in primary sources.10
Homer Glaze’s identification stands on its own, but Enloe’s claim has at least one weak point. Enloe says that the man he saw in the county jail at noon on October 11 asked to visit L. C. Barrow, Clyde’s younger brother, who was held there pending the resolution of a charge of car theft. L. C. Barrow was, indeed, in jail at Sherman on a car theft charge in 1932—he eventually “beat the rap,” as Enloe also says. The problem is that on L. C.’s arrest record, now in the hands of the Barrow family, there is an entry that says, “Dallas, Texas,” dated July 1932, and the next entry says, “Sherman, Texas,” and is dated early December 1932—two months after Hall’s murder. It’s possible that the December date indicates a trial or hearing and that L. C. may have been moved from Dallas to Sherman as early as October. It’s also possible that the December date is correct and Enloe saw somebody else in the jail that day. The truth may never be known.11
Mug shot of L. C. Barrow. Dallas, July 28, 1932.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Several things about the robbery and shooting also seem to go against Clyde’s temperament and way of operating. Clyde preferred to hit stores around noontime when business tended to be slow. The Sherman robber seems to have known to wait until closing in order to get the full day’s receipts, indicating a degree of local knowledge. He missed by a just few minutes. Also, Clyde didn’t tend to lose his cool or abuse innocent bystanders during his jobs. If he was in danger, Clyde would not have hesitated to shoot, as he proved on many occasions, but contrary to later versions, Hall, the butcher, never threatened the young robber with a meat cleaver or anything else. According to reports at the time, Hall was on the receiving end of all the abuse. In all Clyde’s robberies and kidnappings, non-threatening individuals were treated very well. Finally, in all the accounts we have of Clyde contacting anyone who was in jail, he always used other people as messengers instead of going in himself. Of course, nobody is perfectly consistent, and Clyde could have had a bad day and acted out of character. With circumstantial evidence on one side and the departure from Clyde’s normal style on the other, there remains enough doubt for the question of who really killed Howard Hall to remain open.
Whether Bonnie and Clyde were involved in the Sherman shooting or not, they were definitely back in Texas and visiting their family within a week or so of the event. They were, of course, questioned by their family about the Sherman killing, but Clyde insisted they had been in Kansas at the time. Clyde would have probably given the same answer, whether it was the truth or not. The killing of a defenseless old man wasn’t anything to be proud of. Shortly after Halloween, they left Texas for Missouri with two new pa
rtners, Frank Hardy and Hollis Hale.12
Bonnie and Clyde spent most of November 1932 in southwestern Missouri, which was to become one of their favorite areas of operation outside of Texas. Toward the end of the month, they moved into a tourist camp near Carthage and began to plan a bank job.13 The target Clyde had picked was the Farmers and Miner’s Bank in Oronogo, a small town just north of Joplin. Clyde was determined to do this one right, so they took their time. Bonnie was sent in about a week before to examine the inside layout, and Clyde drove over the nearby roads, planning the escape.14
About 8:00 A.M. Wednesday morning, November 30, they stole a Chevrolet sedan from Hugo Weidler’s home on Lyon Street in Carthage, Missouri, and headed west. Bonnie was set up about a mile west of Oronogo on a country road with the getaway car, a Ford V-8, while Clyde and his two new partners took the Chevy into town.
When Clyde and Frank Hardy entered the bank at about 11:30, there were only two people inside. R. A. “Doc” Norton was the cashier, and his only customer was a Frisco train dispatcher named Farrar.15 It should have been a cinch. Clyde and Frank entered the bank, produced a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun, and demanded the money. Unfortunately for them, Doc Norton had been down this road before, and he was prepared. Instead of giving up in fright, he dropped down behind the counter, which had been fitted with a steel plate for just such an occasion, and opened fire with a handgun.16 Clyde blew a couple of holes in the wooden teller’s cage with the shotgun but made no dent in the steel plate. To the immense relief of Mr. Farrar, who was in the crossfire, Norton’s gun jammed after the third shot and he gave up, but for Clyde and his partners, things continued to go wrong. Hardy broke the glass in the teller’s door, cutting his hand in the process, and grabbed what cash he could find—about $100.17
Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Page 10
