Outside, reaction to the gunfire was swift. Jack Watson, a miner working on a derrick across the street, began yelling, “They’re robbing the bank!” Hearing Watson’s shouts, Berly Wetsel, owner of a garage, and Carl Capp, his mechanic, picked up hunting rifles and started toward the scene. Seeing this, Hollis Hale, in the getaway car, began honking the horn. As the armed men came out of the bank, Wetsel, Capp, and several other men retreated to the garage and took cover behind a Phillips Petroleum truck. As luck would have it, the route to Bonnie and the real getaway car ran right by Wetsel’s garage, so a brief but lively firefight broke out as the Chevrolet went by. Thanks to an amazing display of marksmanship by all concerned, no one on either side was hit. The robbers drove on to meet Bonnie, changed cars, and went back to the tourist court outside Carthage.18
Site of the Farmer’s and Miner’s Bank, Oronogo, Missouri, robbed by Clyde Barrow, Frank Hardy, and Hollis Hale, November 30, 1932— as it looks today. The bank occupied the front of the building, with the entrance being the small white door just above the trunk of the white car. In 1932, the rear of the building was occupied by the local post office and the postmaster’s living quarters.
—From the author’s collection
Whether it was the disappointing take of the robbery or the experience of dodging bullets, Hollis Hale and Frank Hardy decided they’d had enough, but they didn’t bother to tell this to Clyde. They left the tourist court on some excuse and simply kept going. Bonnie and Clyde were on their own with only a few dollars between them. They later told their family that Clyde tried another bank job on his own only to find out that there was no money, since the bank had failed only a few days before. Clyde told this story as a joke on himself, and there is no independent confirmation, so it may or may not have happened. In the end, the couple gave up on southwest Missouri and returned to Texas early in December.19
Back in the Dallas area, Bonnie and Clyde managed to keep out of sight and catch up with their family. A week or so later, word came through the grapevine that Ralph Fults, their partner who was captured with Bonnie at Kemp, Texas, back in April, had been moved to the McKinney, Texas, jail. By the time the news reached Barrow, Fults had been convicted of car theft in connection with his and Clyde’s adventures in and around Electra, Texas, in April. By coincidence, Ted Rogers, one of Clyde’s partners in the Bucher robbery, was also at McKinney, on an unrelated charge. Both were awaiting transportation back to Huntsville.
On December 19, someone called to Fults, “Your cousin is here to see you.” The “cousin” was Bonnie Parker. She and Clyde had come to break him out. Due to the way the keys were held, however, no escape was possible until the next morning. Unfortunately, by morning Fults and Rogers were on their way back to prison. Bonnie and Clyde had missed their chance by a day.1 In a few days, however, they would have a new partner.
On Christmas Eve, Bonnie and Clyde were working their way toward the Barrows’ station on Eagle Ford Road when they spotted Henry Barrow’s old truck. L. C. Barrow was driving, and with him was a friend of his, William Daniel Jones. People called him W. D. or “Dub” or “Deacon.” His family and the Barrows had been friends ever since they were all living at the campground. W. D’s older brother was one of Clyde’s closest friends— before Clyde went to prison. Jones claimed to be sixteen years old on this occasion.2 When he was captured in November of the following year, he gave his birthdate as May 12, 1916, and gave the same date on his 1950 Social Security application.3 Some feel that Jones may have understated his age to receive more lenient treatment as a juvenile when he was arrested in November 1933. The Barrow family remember him as being about the same age as L. C. Barrow, who was nineteen in December 1932. Indeed, in the pictures of Jones, taken when he was on the run with Bonnie and Clyde, he looks older than sixteen. In all the police descriptions of Jones as an unknown accomplice, he is said to be twenty to twenty-five years old. Even so, all documentary evidence indicates a 1916 birthdate.
L. C. and W. D. had picked up two girls and a bottle of moonshine earlier in the evening. By the time Clyde met them, they had taken the girls home and almost finished off the whiskey. Jones stayed with Clyde while L. C. left to bring his mother and his sister Marie to the meeting. After the family visit was over, Clyde said he wanted Jones to go with them. He said they had driven a long way and needed someone to keep watch while they slept.4 Looking back on it years later, Jones would claim that this was the biggest mistake of his life, but at the time he went willingly. He had known Clyde and L. C. Barrow most of his life and had asked to go with them before. Ralph Fults remembered Jones hanging around the Barrow station back in March and April 1932 and said Jones would sometimes steal license plates for Clyde.5
With Jones in the car, Clyde drove south to Temple, Texas, and they all checked into a motel. Later that morning, Christmas Day, Jones put on two new tires Clyde had with him,6 and they went off in search of a store to rob. According to Jones’ various statements over the years, he either waited outside while Clyde went in and robbed a grocery store (the story he told Playboy in 1968), or he went in with Clyde but lost his nerve and walked out of the store before Clyde could hold it up, earning himself a severe tongue-lashing (the story he told the Dallas County sheriff in 1933). Whichever story is true, “Deacon” Jones’ first day as a part of the Barrow gang was not going well, and it was about to get a lot worse.
The three of them continued to drive around Temple in Clyde’s Ford V-8 coupe, looking for a score. About 2:30 P.M., they went by a Ford roadster parked in front of 606 South Thirteenth Street. Clyde told W. D. to get out and steal the car. He tried. Even if he was just sixteen years old, this probably wasn’t the first car he had boosted, but for some reason he couldn’t get it started. Clyde got out to help, and Bonnie took the coupe and parked a short distance away. The newspaper says that Clyde and Jones were actually pushing the car along the street when they were spotted.
Inside the house, Doyle Johnson’s in-laws had come over for their granddaughter’s first Christmas. Johnson’s car was parked outside his house on Thirteenth Street, but he was inside taking a nap. Henry Krauser, his father-in-law, was the one who looked out the window and saw the car thieves. He ran out, followed by his son Clarence and Johnson’s wife, Tillie. Seeing the people come out of the house, Clyde and W. D. jumped into the car and tried, once again, to start it. As the Krauser men closed in on the car, however, they got back out and warned them off at gunpoint.
House at 606 South Thirteenth Street, Temple, Texas, as it looks today. On Christmas Day, 1932, this was the home of Doyle Johnson, his wife Tillie, and their infant daughter. This picture was taken from the approximate spot where Johnson was killed by Clyde Barrow and W. D. Jones as he tried to stop them from stealing his car.
—From the author’s collection
Clyde was back in the driver’s seat, trying again to start the car, when Doyle Johnson, awakened by all the shouting, came out of the house and ran down to the curb. Johnson jumped on the running board, reached in, and grabbed the fellow who was trying to steal his car. Barrow responded by pushing a .38 caliber pistol into the man’s side and pulling the trigger. By a great stroke of good luck, Johnson managed to divert the pistol at the last moment so that the bullet went through the left front fender, bounced under the car, and was later found on the ground.
Unfortunately, Johnson’s luck lasted only a few more seconds. That was when W. D. Jones fired from across the car. The bullet went through Johnson’s neck from right to left, striking the spinal cord. He fell off the side of the car, which had finally started, and Clyde and Jones drove away. After all that trouble and bloodshed, they simply drove around the block far enough to get out of sight and abandoned Johnson’s car. Doyle Johnson died shortly after the shooting and was buried on December 27. He was survived by his wife of five years, Tillie Krauser Johnson, and their infant daughter. He was twenty-seven years old.7
W. D. Jones had been with Bonnie and Clyde less than twenty-four h
ours and he and Clyde had just killed a man for his car, which they kept for less than five minutes. Bonnie, who had gone unnoticed as she sat in the Ford coupe, followed and picked up the boys at Avenue F and Seventeenth Street. In the words of W. D. Jones thirty-six years later, they “lit a shuck out of town.”8
Doyle Johnson is the only unarmed civilian definitely known to have been killed during any of the Barrows’ shootings.1 Although the Barrow family said that Clyde was furious with Jones for the killing,2 the fact remains that Clyde had tried his best to shoot Johnson also. The firsthand report clearly says that both men in the car fired at Johnson.3 W. D. just happened to be the one who hit him. Clyde probably left the impression with his family that there wouldn’t have been any shooting if that Jones kid hadn’t lost his head, but it just isn’t so.
The good news for the outlaws was that they got away clean. On the outskirts of town, Clyde had stopped and sent Jones up a telephone pole to cut the wires.4 They weren’t identified at the time, and for almost a year the police had no idea they were involved. After the Johnson shooting, the three of them went back to the Dallas area, Jones went home and Bonnie and Clyde hid out near Grand Prairie.5 Their next public appearance would be the result of helping a friend and just plain bad luck.
The friend in need was Raymond Hamilton. Bonnie and Clyde hadn’t seen him since they dropped him off in Michigan in September, but they had followed his story. Ray was back in Texas by early October and had hit the bank at Cedar Hill alone on the 8th. After that, he teamed up with Gene O’Dare to rob the Carmen State Bank in LaGrange on November 9 and went back to Cedar Hill with a partner named Les on November 25. Flush with funds for the moment, Les went back to west Dallas, and Ray and Gene went back to Bay City, Michigan. Hamilton and O’Dare immediately began using their new wealth to impress some of the local young ladies and attracted the attention of the police as well. Tipped off that the two suspects would be at the local roller rink on the evening of December 6, the officers waited until each one was safely established on wheels and then made their move. They caught Ray on the main floor and Gene in the men’s room.6
Hamilton and O’Dare were back in the Dallas jail by December 14. O’Dare was wanted for bank robbery, but Ray Hamilton was the star prisoner. Ray had been in touch with Clyde through Floyd Hamilton, his older brother, but there wasn’t much anybody could do while Ray was in the Dallas jail. Just after Christmas, though, Ray was moved to Hillsboro to answer charges of murder in the Bucher case. The Hillsboro jail was nothing like the one in Dallas, so Clyde and Floyd Hamilton began trying to get some hacksaw blades inside to Ray.7 About the same time, two other west Dallas boys, Les Stewart, who had been with Raymond Hamilton at Cedar Hill, and Odell Chambless, who happened to be Gene O’Dare’s brother-in-law, went into business for themselves and almost got Clyde Barrow killed.
Stewart and Chambless robbed the bank in Grapevine, Texas, on December 29 and got away with almost $3,000. During the getaway, their car slid off the road, so they split up and continued on foot. Les was arrested a few hours later, but Odell made his way back to west Dallas, where he went to one of Raymond Hamilton’s sisters for assistance. Shortly after that, he left town.
Stewart hadn’t been as lucky as Chambless, so he tried to cut his losses by telling the authorities everything they wanted to know, including his and Odell’s connections with the Hamilton family. Just after New Year’s, the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office contacted the new sheriff of Dallas County, R. A. “Smoot” Schmid, and told him what they had discovered. They agreed on a joint operation centered around one of Ray Hamilton’s married sisters, Lillian McBride. She lived in west Dallas, on County Avenue, just a few blocks east and around the corner from Henry Barrow’s Star Service Station. On the evening of January 6, 1933, everything came together.
Earlier in the day, a Dallas County deputy, Ed Castor, had come by and asked Mrs. McBride a few questions, which made her suspicious. About 11:00 P.M. several more men returned. Since they hoped to catch Chambless for the Grapevine bank job, most of the officers were from Tarrant County. Assistant District Attorney W. T. Evans and Special Ranger J. F. Van Noy were there, along with Fort Worth Deputies Dusty Rhodes and Malcolm Davis. Representing Dallas County was Deputy Sheriff Fred Bradberry
Instead of finding Lillian McBride at home, they found her younger sister, Maggie Fairris, and her children. The lawmen decided to wait anyway. Evans and Davis went around to the back porch while Bradberry, Van Noy, and Rhodes settled down in the front room and began to question Mrs. Fairris. They could tell she was nervous. After a while, she got up and put the kids to bed, and then Deputy Bradberry told her to put out the lights. That was fine, she said, but could she just leave on a small red light—for the children? The deputy agreed. He didn’t realize that the little red light was not a child’s night-light. It was a signal. Unknown to the lawmen, the Grapevine bank robbery and Clyde Barrow’s plan to help Ray Hamilton break out of the Hillsboro jail were about to come together at Lillian McBride’s house, and somebody was going to die.
Just after sundown that same day, Clyde Barrow had knocked on Lillian McBride’s door. He wanted to find out if the hacksaw blades, hidden in a small radio, had been delivered to Ray Hamilton. This was the plan he, Raymond and Floyd Hamilton, and Lillian had worked out. Ray had sawed himself out of the jail in McKinney a year before, and he thought he could do it again. Like the lawmen, Clyde also found Maggie Fairris the only one at home, and she was quick to tell him about the visit by police earlier in the day.8 Clyde said he would try again after midnight, but if the law returned, she should leave a red light on in the window. So far, the plan was working.
Maggie Fairris was indeed worried, just as Deputy Bradberry observed, but she had managed to turn on the red light, so maybe Clyde would get the message and stay away. Just after midnight, a Ford coupe drove slowly down the deserted street and almost stopped, but then went on around the corner. Bradberry’s instincts told him this was not a random car, and he insisted that the red light be turned out. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes, the car came back and stopped in front of the house. A small man in a hat and overcoat got out and walked to the front porch. Bradberry told Maggie to open the door, since he thought they had a two-bit thief named Odell Chambless. Maggie Fairris, however, knew exactly who it was, and she guessed what was coming. Knowing the position she was in, her nerve finally broke. As she opened the door, she cried, “Don’t shoot . . . Think of my babies!”
Clyde had been caught in a bad position. His instincts, which usually told him when the law was present, had failed him, but his reflexes didn’t. He opened his overcoat, swung up a 16-gauge shotgun, and fired from a distance of ten feet—not at Maggie in the doorway, but through the front window at the lawmen. The window sash and most of the glass blew into the room and all the officers hit the floor. Clyde backed off the porch as he tried to pry out the empty shell that had jammed in the shotgun’s breech.9 Meanwhile, the blast that put the officers in the house on the floor jarred the officers on the back porch into action. Evans and Malcolm Davis raced from the back of the house to the front. Unfortunately for Davis, he won, running up just as Clyde cleared the jam in his shotgun. “Get back!” Clyde shouted as the officers came around the side of the house. Davis kept coming, and Clyde fired. From a few feet away, he couldn’t miss, and Davis took the load of buckshot in the chest. Evans hit the ground in time to avoid a second shot in his direction.
In a few seconds, the quiet neighborhood had erupted in chaos. To make matters worse, W. D. Jones, who had just rejoined them, began shooting toward the house from the back seat of the Ford parked at the curb. Men were running, women were screaming, people on both sides were firing into the dark, and Malcolm Davis was dying. The confusion was such that, a couple of minutes later, one of the officers fired on a group of men he thought were more of the outlaws. In fact, they were lifting the mortally wounded Davis into a car to rush him to the hospital. Mercifully, no one was hit.<
br />
Police reenactment of the killing of Deputy Malcolm Davis at the home of Lillian McBride, 507 County Avenue, January 6, 1933.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Bonnie had sense enough to stop Jones, saying he was more likely to hit Clyde or somebody in one of the houses. She later told the family that she knew Clyde was either already dead or trying to get away, so she drove the Ford away and turned west on Eagle Ford Road. After he shot Davis, Clyde ran down the side of the McBride house and headed for the main road. Bonnie saw him running between houses and stopped for him. He took the wheel and began cranking a large siren he used to clear traffic during getaways. As he drove west, he passed his younger sister, Marie, going home on her bicycle. She was coming from the house of her best friend, Audrey Hamilton, another of Ray’s sisters.
Lillian McBride’s house in west Dallas, as it looks today.
—Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele
By daylight, Bonnie, Clyde, and Jones had left Texas for Oklahoma. Before long, they were back in southwest Missouri, where they disappeared for about three weeks. Clyde and W. D. Jones had now killed two men in less than two weeks—one over a car they kept for about five minutes, and the other because Clyde walked into someone else’s troubles. Even the plan that sent Clyde to the McBride house fell apart. Two days after the shooting, Raymond was discovered sawing away in his cell at Hillsboro and was sent back to Dallas.10
In April 1932 Harry D. Durst began his term as mayor of the city of Springfield, Missouri, and one of the first things he did was appoint some new men to the Springfield police force. One of the first new recruits was a twenty-four-year-old adding machine salesman named Tom Persell. Within ninety days of his appointment, he had chased down and captured two car thieves. By January 1933, Persell was assigned to motorcycle duty.
Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Page 11
