Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update

by James R Knight

  By midday, Buck was in Perry, Iowa. He was taken to King’s Daughters Hospital, where Chapler and Osborn were able to remove the bullet from his chest. The two bullets in his hip could not be located easily, but they presented little danger compared to the other two wounds. The doctors agreed that he would probably develop meningitis from the head wound or pneumonia from the chest wound. Either way, there was little hope for his recovery.21 Blanche was taken first to the county seat of Adel, and then to Des Moines. Late Tuesday evening, July 25, she was moved to Platte City, Missouri. She never saw her husband again.

  Blanche in custody at Des Moines, Iowa. July 1933.

  —Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele

  While all this was going on, the free members of the gang had troubles of their own. The only way to go from the Fellers farm was north to the town of Panora. From there, they drove generally eastward for a while. Before long, though, the blue ’29 Plymouth, which had seemed like their salvation, had a flat.22 The two wounded men managed to change the tire, but the old Plymouth didn’t seem like it would last for the long haul. Shortly after the flat, they lost control and sideswiped a telephone pole. By now, they were near the town of Polk City, north of Des Moines, so they robbed a gas station and stole a Chevrolet.23 Then, as they had done so many times before, they simply disappeared. Over the following several days, they would be reported in many places in the Midwest, but they had gone to ground. It would be four months before another lawman got a clear shot at Bonnie and Clyde.

  Blanche Barrow, identification card from Des Moines, Iowa, following the shootout near Dexter, Iowa, July 24, 1933.

  —Courtesy Rick Mattix

  King’s Daughters Hospital, Perry, Iowa. Buck Barrow was taken here for surgery to remove a bullet from his chest after the Dexfield shootout. His mother and brother, L. C., arrived two days later, but Buck developed pneumonia and possibly meningitis from his wounds and died here on July 29, 1933.

  —Courtesy Rick Mattix

  One of the cars abandoned by the Barrow gang at Dexter, Iowa, July 24, 1933. This car was stolen in Perry, Iowa, from Edward Stoner on July 23, 1933, and recovered the next day, after the gunfight. The Ford V-8 was later put on display at a gas station in Dexter, Iowa, and finally cut up during a scrap-metal drive during World War II.

  —Courtesy the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Waco, Texas

  News of the Dexter shootout and the capture and wounding of Buck Barrow reached the Barrow family in Dallas late on Monday, July 24. At 1:00 A.M. Tuesday morning, Cumie Barrow and her son L. C. left for Iowa. With them went Bonnie’s mother, Emma Parker, and her sister, Billie Mace. A friend of Blanche’s, May Turner, went also, but Blanche had been moved before she got there. The group from Texas arrived just before noon on Wednesday the 26th. By then, Buck was in and out of consciousness and running a fever of 104. All Cumie could do was sit by him and hold his hand. A reporter for the Perry paper was so impressed by Cumie’s sorrow that he wrote a short column about her. When the reporter asked about Buck, Cumie just said, “He was a good boy when he was little.”1 Four months before, Buck had walked out of prison a free man and gone home to his wife with a pardon from the state of Texas. Now it had come to this.

  During the first couple of days that Buck was in King’s Daughters Hospital—before the high fever and coma set in—he talked freely to everyone and had a lot of visitors. Among the various lawmen who wanted to question him was Crawford County (Arkansas) Sheriff Albert Maxey. As soon as word came of Buck’s capture, Maxey and Deputy Salyers, who had survived the gunfight that killed Marshal Henry Humphrey, started for Iowa. Buck had been identified by several witnesses, and they wanted to talk to him. On Tuesday afternoon, they got in to see him. “Do you remember me, Buck?” Salyers asked.

  “I sure do,” Buck said. “It was a good thing you got out of the way, or you might have got yours.”2

  Buck talked at some length to Sheriff Maxey and freely confessed that he had been the one who shot Marshal Humphrey.3 He also answered other questions that cleared up several things about the Crawford County incident. For instance, nobody knew how Buck and his partner got back together with the rest of the gang at the motel, or even who the partner was. Most folks assumed it was Clyde, but Buck was very firm in saying that Clyde was not at the shooting. He had stayed at the motel with Bonnie. Buck told Maxey about walking across the railroad bridge to get back to the motel and that, while the police were combing the brush north of Van Buren on Friday night, the gang was moving to Oklahoma. Contrary to the statement made later in the book Fugitives, Buck also denied any involvement in the attack on Mrs. Rogers and stated that the entire Barrow group was in eastern Oklahoma at the time.4

  The one thing Buck would not talk about was the identity of his partner at the Alma shooting. Other than saying that Clyde was not involved, he had no comment. W. D. had used the alias “Jack Sherman,” and that name was circulating, but his real identity was still unknown to authorities.5 Thirty miles away, the authorities were leaning on Blanche for the same information. Buck had used a silent approach, but Blanche decided on a different strategy. She lied.

  While Buck was moved to the hospital in Perry, Blanche ended up in custody in Des Moines. There she was interrogated Monday evening and on through Tuesday. Blanche said that even J. Edgar Hoover flew in to question her. She had a patch over one eye, and she said that Hoover threatened to “gouge out” her other eye if she didn’t talk.6 Blanche talked, all right, and they thought she had given them what they wanted— the name of the third man. Nobody believed the “Jack Sherman” alias for long, but Blanche gave them another name—Hubert Bleigh. Something about Blanche’s “cooperation” must have impressed the lawmen, because they immediately began to look for this man.

  Hubert Newton Bleigh, alias Herbert Blythe, age twenty-six, was certainly not the man the law was seeking—W. D. Jones was still at large and unidentified—but he wasn’t a fictitious character like “Jack Sherman” either. He was probably some small-time crook whom Blanche remembered from the gang’s earlier dealings. Whoever he was, he was alive and well two days later when Oklahoma authorities found him reading a newspaper in an oil field grocery store near Seminole and arrested him.7 He claimed that he had been in Oklahoma visiting his brother for the last three weeks. Of course, nobody expected him to admit that he was Clyde Barrow’s partner in any case. There was also a matter of some stolen goods found in his car. Blythe spent Friday in Oklahoma City with federal officers. In Kansas City, his picture was identified by Platte City witnesses. On Saturday, July 29, Marvin Ivan “Buck” Barrow died in Perry, Iowa, and Herbert Blythe was “positively” identified as Buck’s accomplice in the Alma shooting by the two living witnesses, Deputy Salyers and Weber Wilson, who had been driven to Oklahoma City to see him.8 Federal officers turned him over to Sheriff Albert Maxey, and by Saturday evening, Blythe was sitting in the Crawford County Jail at Van Buren.9 To no one’s surprise, Blythe told anyone who would listen that they had the wrong man. He swore he was not involved in any of the Barrows’ shootings. He was telling the truth, but nobody believed him.

  The case against Blythe seemed solid. By August 1, the Fort Smith Times Record was reporting that Crawford County prosecuting attorney Finis F. Batchelor was ready to file first-degree murder charges. The promise of a big trial and the prospect of justice served was not to be, however. As the days went by, the eyewitnesses became less positive. By August 11, Sheriff Maxey and Prosecuting Attorney Batchelor had given up. Several of the eyewitnesses now said that Blythe resembled one of the men, but no one was prepared to testify against him in a murder trial. Blythe had always denied any part in the Alma shooting, but he was not away free and clear. There was still that matter of the stolen goods found in his car. On August 11, when Blythe was released in Van Buren, U.S. Marshal Cooper Hudspeth took charge of him and transported him to Muskogee, Oklahoma, for arraignment on robbery charges. But that was better than being linked to Bonnie an
d Clyde.10

  Meanwhile, the clues to the whereabouts of Bonnie and Clyde were few and far between. The car they stole in Polk City, Iowa, was recovered three days later in Broken Bow, Nebraska, but, other than that, the trail was cold.11 What we know about their movements during August comes almost exclusively from the testimony of W. D. Jones and the memory of Clyde’s sister, Marie, and the two versions don’t always coincide.

  Both agree that the three of them spent most of August moving around, holding up service stations and grocery stores, and healing from their wounds. Jones later said that they broke into an armory in Illinois for weapons and ammunition. There is no confirmation for this, but since they left Dexter with one empty pistol between the three of them, weapons would be one of Clyde’s top priorities.12 Around the first of September, W. D. Jones left the gang for good, but there are conflicting accounts about how it happened.

  Mug shot of William Daniel Jones. Taken in Dallas, November 25, 1933, three months after he left Bonnie and Clyde.

  —From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library

  On two different occasions, W. D. Jones said that when he left Bonnie and Clyde for the last time, he had to run away from them. He said he got away after putting gas in one of their stolen cars near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and then hitchhiked, or “hoboed,” back to the Houston, Texas, area, where his mother lived.13

  Marie Barrow remembers it differently. She said that Jones agreed to stay with Bonnie and Clyde until they had recovered enough to go it alone. Meanwhile, they coached Jones on what he should say if he was ever arrested. The story was similar to the one Bonnie had used when she was arrested at Kaufman, Texas, the year before. Jones was to say that he was Clyde’s prisoner, that he was tied to trees at night to keep him from escaping. He would also claim he was unconscious when any shooting or killing was going on. Marie said that just after the first of September, Bonnie and Clyde took Jones back to west Dallas themselves.14 Whether Jones escaped or was taken home by his heroes, and whether he made up his story himself or was coached by Clyde, in less than three months, Jones would have a chance to tell his story to police.

  In fact, W. D. Jones actually told his story a third time. A little over a year after he was arrested and gave his statement to Dallas authorities, he, along with several others, was tried for harboring Bonnie and Clyde. In his testimony at the trial, Jones ended his account of his time with the Barrow gang by saying that sometime after the August 20, 1933, robbery of the armory in Illinois, he returned to Dallas with Bonnie and Clyde, contradicting his earlier testimony in Dallas.15 Whatever the truth of the events surrounding William Daniel “Deacon” Jones’ final separation from the Barrow gang, one thing is certain. The young man had enjoyed about all the glamorous outlaw life he could stand. He considered himself lucky to be alive and was happy to go back to picking cotton.16

  If you were to give the time from March through October 1933 a name, it might be “Gangster Summer.” The list of people active during this time reads like a who’s who of depression-era outlaws. Rarely in American history have so many infamous characters been in the news at the same time. Reputations and careers—on both sides of the law—were made during this time. One man, the director of a small investigative arm of the Justice Department, took advantage of government reorganization under new president Franklin D. Roosevelt and public interest in the crime wave that seemed to be sweeping the country to lay the foundation of a personal empire that would last for forty years. The agency that would become J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would play only a small part in the Bonnie and Clyde story, however. Its fame was gained by going after other famous criminals, and, in the summer of 1933, there were a lot to choose from.

  Headlines featured the Barrows’ three major shootouts, along with Pretty Boy Floyd, Vern Miller, “Jelly” Nash, and the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City. The Barker brothers and Alvin Karpis in Minnesota, and George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn in Oklahoma got into the kidnapping business, and Harvey Bailey, Wilbur Underhill (the Tri-State Terror), and nine others broke out of the Kansas State Prison—all before Labor Day. Unnoticed amid all this activity, on May 22, 1933, an unknown thirty-year-old from Mooresville, Indiana, was released from prison after nine years. While Bonnie and Clyde would be known by their first names, this fellow’s last name would be his trademark. John Dillinger’s career only lasted a year, but among all the other bad men of the depression, he would become the superstar.

  All this activity made for booming newspaper sales, but when Bonnie and Clyde got back to Dallas in early September, they would have been happy to never read their names in the headlines again. The past four months had made them famous—and almost destroyed them in the process. Every member of the Barrow gang of 1933 had been killed, wounded, or captured. They wanted nothing more than to reconnect with their families and keep their heads down.

  The family in Dallas, who hadn’t seen them since early June, immediately noticed the changes in Bonnie and Clyde. First were the obvious physical changes. Both were thin from hard living and scarred from several gunshot wounds. Emma Parker, who hadn’t seen her daughter since before the Wellington wreck, was shocked. Never very large to begin with, Bonnie was even thinner and looked older than her twenty-three years. Bonnie’s right leg looked awful from the burns and was drawn up underneath her so that she couldn’t walk normally.1 Marie Barrow said that the family noticed psychological changes as well. The pair both seemed, more than ever, fatalistic about their future. Buck’s death affected Clyde deeply, and he and Bonnie had no illusions as to what awaited them. They seemed to feel that they would rather face it in Texas, where they were near the only people they loved and trusted.2

  At this point, Bonnie and Clyde were living completely in their car or in abandoned farmhouses. Their families helped them as much as they could with food and blankets, and Clyde supported them with low-profile, nickel-and-dime robberies. Faced with this sort of situation, it helps if you are a little creative, and they were. One of their favorite tricks was to drive into a town late at night and park in somebody’s driveway. The police always assumed the car belonged there, so they could sleep almost all night. The only time it didn’t work was when an irate wife saw them and accused her husband of having his drinking buddies sneak by to pick him up. They heard her yelling and didn’t wait around to hear the end of the argument.3

  Bonnie and Clyde had been away almost four months, so now that they were back in the area, they stayed close to home. Emma Parker said that they came by either her house or the Barrow filling station almost every night during September and October. Why the Dallas Sheriff’s Department didn’t just stake out the two places and catch them was a source of amazement to both families, but “the kids,” as the families called them, came and went pretty much at will.4 When they weren’t coming by to visit, the family was meeting them out in the country somewhere.

  Marie Barrow remembered some humorous incidents that took their minds off the cloud that hung over them all, at least for a while, and in one of them, Clyde’s ego got the best of him. It seems that Clyde’s brother L. C. had come by a motorcycle from some source, and, at one of their country meetings, Clyde decided to demonstrate his driving skills. As it happened, his mastery of the Ford V-8 didn’t translate to the two-wheeler. Clyde got on the motorcycle and drove down the country road and out of sight. He said he would be right back, but the minutes passed with no sign of him. Just as they were preparing to organize a search party, they heard a gunshot and hurried off in that direction. Instead of a posse, they found Clyde in a field beside the road—pinned under the motorcycle. It had gotten away from him, and he had to use the only signaling device he had, his ever-present pistol. Luckily, nothing was bruised but Clyde’s pride.5

  Along with the happiness that came from being back home that autumn, there was also sorrow. Bonnie loved babies, and, since she had none of her own, her favorites were her little nephews, Bud
dy and Jackie, Billie Jean Mace’s children. On October 11, 1933, two-year-old Jackie became ill and died two days later. Bonnie took the news very hard. On Sunday the 15th, Mrs. Parker met Bonnie again and told her that four-year-old Buddy was now sick as well. By the next day, he was in the hospital, and by Tuesday night he was dead also. When Mrs. Parker came to tell Bonnie the news on Wednesday evening, Bonnie told her that she had already seen Buddy dead in a dream.6

  The deaths of the two little children came at a time when Clyde was looking ahead to his own end. Buck had been in the ground a little over two months, but there was still no headstone. These were hard times, and the Barrows, like most of their neighbors, were forced to be practical. By now, everybody accepted the fact that Clyde would never surrender and that even if he did, the electric chair was waiting for him. It was agreed that both brothers would be buried side by side and one stone used for both. Clyde even picked the color and his inscription: “Gone But Not Forgotten.”7

  October turned into November, and things remained calm. Of course, Bonnie and Clyde sightings still occurred almost every day, and the newspapers linked Clyde with a series of robberies all over the area. Sometimes, Clyde really was involved—they had to eat, after all—but most of these were cases of a well-known name being put to a face seen only over the barrel of a gun. The family meetings continued every few days, and everybody kept their fingers crossed.

  The family meeting was a thing Clyde Barrow had perfected over the last year and a half. There were literally dozens of places in the countryside outside Dallas where he and Bonnie could meet with family and friends in relative safety. The secret to keeping the meetings safe was short notice and unpredictability. Clyde would leave word at his father’s Star Service Station, and his mother would pass the message to the rest of the Barrow and Parker families by using code words in phone calls. No one knew exactly where the meeting would be until the last minute. In this way, the risk was kept to a minium. On November 21, 1933, a meeting was held on a strip of newly graded road near the tiny town of Sowers. If you drive by it today, on your way to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, you see a Ramada Inn, a McDonald’s, and a Red Lobster because Sowers is near the intersection of Texas State Highway 183 and Esters Road, just west of Irving, but in the winter of 1933, it was out in the boondocks. The property along the road was owned by Charlie Stovall, who ran a dairy farm.8