Neither of the mothers could face the prospect of dealing with the authorities in Louisiana. Henry Barrow was driven to Arcadia by his oldest son, Jack, and when he arrived, he walked into a madhouse. He had to fight his way inside the furniture store, but, in spite of everything, he seemed calm and freely talked to the people there while waiting for the officials to finish their work. Buster Parker, sent to pick up his sister’s body, confused the town of Arcadia with Acadia Parish, west of Lafayette, and went to the wrong place.17
A local photographer, and later one from Dallas, began taking a series of photographs— everything from the undraped bodies, to more modest, if no less gruesome, shots with all the dignitaries standing in the background. The local man, King Murphy, did a brisk business. He and his wife developed the pictures themselves, washing the prints in their bathtub, and sold them to all comers—$5 for individuals; $50 for the press.18 Denny Hayes, Dallas photojournalist, took a series of pictures of several Dallas officials with the bodies.19
Bonnie and Clyde at the undertaker’s office in the rear of Conger’s Furniture Store following the ambush. Arcadia, Louisiana, May 23, 1934.
—Courtesy Sandy Jones–The John Dillinger Historical Society
While the embalmers were finishing up and the bodies were prepared for public viewing, newsmen from far and wide converged on the posse members. They did succeed in getting a few posed pictures, but not much information. Frank Hamer, especially, was very circumspect in what he said. Never one to talk much to reporters in the first place, he had to be even more careful now. He and Bob Alcorn had been involved in planning the ambush from the first meeting with Sheriff Henderson Jordan and Methvin family representative John Joyner almost three months ago, but he couldn’t let that be known. Protecting his sources was a serious matter with Hamer, whether they were criminals or not.
Also, for different reasons, most of the posse members were troubled about what happened out on that road. Alcorn had known Clyde personally, and Ted Hinton was a friendy acquaintance of Bonnie. Prentis Oakley was never able to get over the fact that he fired early, with no warning, or erase from his mind the picture of Clyde’s head snapping back as his bullet hit. Henderson Jordan felt that the two should have at least been given the chance to surrender. Even Frank Hamer, the consummate professional manhunter, would later say: “As they drove up that day, and I pulled down on Barrow, knowing that some of my rifle bullets were going to snuff out her life along with his . . . I hated to have to shoot her.” 20 Manny Gault never made his feelings known. Also, the posse was not very communicative because all of them were still partially deaf several hours after the shooting.
Once the undertaker finished the embalming, he put the two desperadoes on public display, and the crowd filed by in a continuous line for almost six hours.21 Through it all, Clyde’s father, who had been a perfect gentleman throughout the insanity at Arcadia, was listening. He heard the name “Methvin” mentioned often enough to confirm his own suspicions.22 Clyde had often told his family that he expected to be betrayed by a friend.
Late in the afternoon, Henry Barrow was allowed to take his son home—his second child killed by police bullets in ten months. Whatever remained of Clyde’s possessions were sent home with him. This mainly consisted of the clothes he was wearing, a gold watch, and $505.32 in cash, just barely enough to cover his funeral. A diamond stick pin had disappeared.23 It would be almost 10:00 P.M. before Buster Parker arrived for his sister, after a 300-mile detour into south Louisiana, but by the morning of May 24, 1934, America’s most famous outlaw couple was back home in Dallas, where the public frenzy continued.24
Clyde was taken to Sparkman–Holtz–Brand Funeral Home at 2110 Ross Avenue, and the crowds arrived early. Eventually, almost 10,000 people would pass by. When the funeral home wouldn’t respond to their shouts, they pounded on the doors. When everything else had failed, they began pulling up shrubbery. Henry Barrow finally consented to allow the public to view Clyde’s body—as much for the beleaguered funeral home whose property was being destroyed as anything else.25
When the people finally began filing in, they saw Clyde laid out in a fairly plain casket and dressed in a nice gray suit, with his father and his brother L. C. standing nearby. Maybe it was because of the long wait, but, instead of some respect for the recently departed, this crowd eventually became downright rude. Finally, when a drunk staggered by and said, “I’m glad he’s dead,” Henry Barrow snapped. Whatever his son had done, he wasn’t going to put up with this any longer. The nice, quiet, sixty-year-old gentleman physically cleared the room, and Clyde’s younger brother L. C. blocked the door. That was the end of the public viewing.26
Crowd gathers at Sparkman–Holtz–Brand funeral home for Clyde Barrow’s funeral, May 25, 1934.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Cumie Barrow at Clyde’s grave, May 25, 1934.
—Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele
The public expectation that there might be a joint funeral and the couple buried together—side by side, as Bonnie’s last poem had said—was quickly dispelled by both families. Clyde’s funeral would be the next day, the 25th, and he would be buried beside his brother Buck at Western Heights Cemetery. At 5:00, after a private service, the family left the funeral home for the burial. Western Heights was small, and the crowd was large, so the graveside service was a nightmare. People stole everything from flowers to dirt clods for souvenirs. A light plane flew over and dropped more flowers, and these were fought over as well. The crowd pressed in so much that some of the family couldn’t get near the seating area, while others were almost pushed into the open grave. The service was mercifully short, and soon everyone was moving away.27 Clyde’s total funeral expenses were $500.28
One face, lost in the crowd, was that of a jugeared man who seemed to have a stomachache. Joe Palmer had been in the lobby of the Lee Huckins Hotel in Oklahoma City when he heard the announcement that Bonnie and Clyde had been killed. With Clyde dead and Raymond Hamilton in jail, Joe was now the most wanted man in the Southwest, but he rode the bus to Dallas to pay his respects to his friend.29
While Clyde returned to Dallas and was buried in the family plot next to his brother Buck, Bonnie’s situation was a little more complicated. Emma Parker had kept a small insurance policy on all her children so she could afford to give her daughter the kind of attention Emma felt she deserved—hair done, nails polished, and a new silk negligee—but she wasn’t able to give Bonnie her last wish. Emma wanted to bring Bonnie home, as Bonnie had requested at their last meeting, but when the police simply asked her to look out her front door at the crowds, Emma understood that it would be impossible.30 Instead, the public was allowed to view Bonnie at McKamy-Campbell Funeral Home at 1921 Forrest Avenue. Twenty thousand people filed past. Unlike the Barrow family’s experience, this crowd was quiet and respectful, and no incidents were reported.31
Emma Parker had immediately dismissed the notion that Bonnie would be buried next to Clyde. “Clyde had her for two years, and look what it did to her,” Emma said.32 Bonnie was to be buried in Fishtrap Cemetery, near her grandparents’ home in west Dallas, but the funeral was postponed because of Bonnie’s sister.
Whether for ulterior motives, as some suggest, or just from confusion, William Schieffer, the farmer who had identified Clyde and Bonnie as the ones who killed the two motorcycle policemen on Easter Sunday, had reconsidered and now said that Floyd Hamilton and Billie Jean Mace were the culprits. Floyd Hamilton, along with his brother Raymond, was already in jail on other charges, but, four days before Bonnie was killed, the Tarrant County sheriff had arrested Bonnie’s sister on a charge of murder.
Both the Barrows and the Parkers knew that Billie Jean and Floyd were innocent. They were pushing the police to examine the guns found in Clyde’s car and at the same time trying to delay Bonnie’s service until Billie was free to attend. On Saturday morning, the 26t
h, preliminary ballistics tests of some of Clyde’s guns indicated that they were used at Grapevine, and Billie was granted a leave to attend Bonnie’s funeral.33
At 2:00 that afternoon, a short service was held at the funeral home. Six pallbearers, including L. C. Barrow, carried Bonnie’s casket down to the hearse, and they left for the cemetery. At Fishtrap, there was a short ceremony, and among those seated at the graveside were Henry and Cumie Barrow. Bonnie Parker Thornton, twenty-three, beloved daughter and sister, popular schoolgirl and waitress, amateur poet, and the most infamous female outlaw since Belle Starr, was laid to rest beside her two little nephews, Billie’s babies, who had died six months before. True to a verse in her last poem, among the carloads of flowers, one of the largest wreaths was from the newsboys of Dallas.34 For the last two years, Bonnie and Clyde had provided these young street businessmen with a lot of headlines. The famous outlaws’ deaths had sold a halfmillion papers in Dallas alone.35
In a little over two years, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had gone from an unknown twentythree-year-old hardened, fatalistic, unemployed ex-convict and a tiny twenty-one-year-old lonely, bored, part-time waitress and abandoned housewife to the most famous and feared outlaw couple in the country. The common people of the Southwest might not know who their senator or representative was, but they knew about Bonnie and Clyde. Lawmen cursed them because they couldn’t catch them, and mothers told their disobedient children, “The Barrow gang will get you if you don’t watch out.” Like all of us, they were people full of contradictions. They were capable of deep love for each other and their families, and extreme and seemingly senseless violence to others—sometimes all in the same day.
Family members and pallbearers leaving Bonnie Parker’s funeral, May 26, 1934.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
There is always a price for the way people decide to live, and that price is often paid by the innocent as well as the guilty. The price for Bonnie and Clyde’s freedom was paid by their friends and partners who died or were shot or imprisoned. It was paid by their victims who tried to arrest them, or who simply stood between them and a few dollars or their next Ford V-8. It was paid by those victims’ families, who had to live on in hard times without a husband or father. It was paid by their own families, who could only watch helplessly as their children became hunted animals and, finally, bullet-riddled corpses, and as their family name became synonymous with lawlessness. This price is still being paid three generations later.36
Finally, the price was paid by Bonnie and Clyde themselves. Despite the cynical claims and lurid stories in the press, Bonnie and Clyde loved each other—what they endured for each other’s sake proves it—but they also destroyed each other. How must it feel, at age twenty-three or twenty-five, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that by your own actions you are doomed, and nobody can help you?
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow lived their lives on their own terms, while trying to convince themselves that accepting their fate somehow made it more noble, but the price was terribly, tragically high.
Bonnie Parker’s headstone at Fishtrap Cemetery, 1934. In 1945, Bonnie’s remains, along with this headstone, were moved to Crown Hill Cemetery in Dallas.
—Courtesy Bob Fischer/Renay Stanard collection
The mothers. Cumie Barrow, on the left, and Emma Parker, on the right, during a break in the “Crime Does Not Pay” show, October 1934.
—Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele
Bonnie and Clyde were dead. Their two-year run through the back roads and newspaper headlines of the Southwest was over. After their ambush in Louisiana, law enforcement agencies in several states were able to close the books on many open cases, but the fallout wasn’t quite over. The federal authorities had one more card to play.
Unlike the cases of John Dillinger, Lester “Baby Faced Nelson” Gillis, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Alvin Karpis, and others, federal agencies played a relatively minor role in the search for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. A federal agent, Lester Kendale, was present at the first meeting in Bienville Parish that set the ambush in motion, but the operation itself was carried out by Louisiana and Texas officers. The fact remained, however, that Bonnie and Clyde were wanted for a federal crime, interstate transportation of a stolen car. This allowed the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas to step in after the state courts were finished.
A few of Bonnie and Clyde’s associates had been arrested and charged with various things, but everyone knew that many other people had helped them along the way. On February 22, 1935, the United States District Court in Dallas began the trial of twenty people charged with harboring Bonnie and Clyde as federal fugitives. The trial lasted four days1 and included as defendants hardened criminals already facing life in prison, as well as teenagers, housewives, and mothers who had never spent a day in a cell. To no one’s surprise, all twenty were found guilty.
What follows are the details of that trial:2
Cumie T. Barrow being carried into the courthouse for the harboring trial. Dallas, February 22, 1934.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Male defendants at harboring trial. Dallas, February 22, 1934.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Female defendants at harboring trial. Dallas, February 22, 1934.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
John Basden was an ex-con, truck driver, and friend of Floyd Hamilton’s. Needing money, he convinced Floyd to take him along when Floyd and his brother, Raymond Hamilton, robbed a bank in Grand Prairie, Texas. He also admitted going along with Floyd Hamilton and others to meet Bonnie and Clyde on two occasions. Basden was found guilty and given one year and a day in a federal penitentiary.
Mrs. Cumie T. Barrow, Clyde’s mother, was shown, by the testimony of several other witnesses, to have visited her son and Bonnie Parker on many occasions and given them aid. Even though she had broken the law, most of the people felt sympathy for the sixty-one-year-old woman who had lost two sons to lawmen’s guns. The judge asked her what she thought a fair sentence would be. Maybe sixty days in jail? “Well, I’m needed at home. Won’t thirty days be enough?” Cumie answered. “Thirty days,” the judge said.
L. C. Barrow was next. Four years younger than Clyde, L. C. had been involved from the first in helping Clyde and Bonnie. He met with them many times, did errands, provided support and intelligence, and even traveled with them a few times. He was one of the few people Clyde trusted completely. Fortunately for him, he was never with them when they encountered the law. Now twenty-one years old, L. C. was well known to Dallas police as a criminal in his own right and was accused of robbery and car theft as well as harboring. He was given one year and one day in a federal penitentiary.
Audrey Barrow was the sixteen-year-old wife of L. C. Barrow. She had no record but admitted being with L. C. once when he met with Clyde. She was given fifteen days in jail.
Blanche Caldwell Barrow, twenty-four, was Clyde’s sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Buck. She and Buck were with Bonnie and Clyde for almost four months in 1933, during which time three lawmen were killed. Blanche was captured and tried by the state of Missouri as an accessory in the gunfight at Platte City. She was currently serving ten years in that state. On the federal charge, Blanche was given one year and a day.
Hilton Bybee was brought to the courtroom from the state prison at Huntsville, Texas. He was one of the prisoners involved in the Eastham Prison Farm escape in January 1934. He stayed with Bonnie and Clyde for a few days and helped them rob one bank. He was sentenced to ninety days in jail, an essentially meaningless gesture since he was already serving a life term for murder in a case unrelated to the Barrows.
Joe Chambliss was the
father of Mary O’Dare, the wife of Gene O’Dare, Raymond Hamilton’s partner in a bank robbery. After her husband was put in jail, Mary became Raymond’s girlfriend and traveled with Bonnie and Clyde for a few weeks in early 1934. Joe, her father, was evidently involved in some of the meetings, because he was given sixty days in jail.
Alice Hamilton Davis was the mother of Raymond and Floyd Hamilton. She was involved in the harboring trial mainly because her two sons were Clyde Barrow’s friends and sometime partners. She was given thirty days in jail.
Steve Davis was Alice’s husband and the Hamilton boys’ stepfather. Steve was known to have been involved in some petty theft, but his involvement with Bonnie and Clyde was minor. Davis received ninety days in jail.
Joe Bill Francis was twenty years old and recently married to Clyde’s youngest sister, Marie. He ran around with Clyde’s brother L. C. and often drove the car when the Barrow family went out in the country to see Bonnie and Clyde. Joe Bill was driving on the evening in November 1933 when his car, with several family members inside, was almost caught in the crossfire of an ambush set by the Dallas County sheriff. Francis was given sixty days in jail.
Marie Barrow Francis, Joe Bill’s wife and Clyde’s sister, was just sixteen years old, but she had gone to most of the family meetings and generally did whatever she could for her brother Clyde. One of the things she was perfectly suited for was shopping for Bonnie. Since they had to remain in hiding, Clyde would give the family money, and his mother and Marie would buy clothes for Bonnie. At the time, Marie had been fifteen years old and wore the same size as Bonnie in everything except shoes.3 Because of her youth, Marie was sentenced to one hour in the custody of the United States marshal.
Floyd Hamilton was a vital contact for Clyde Barrow. Floyd’s younger brother Raymond was Clyde’s partner during three different periods of Barrow’s career. Floyd met with them many times, providing clothes, cars, and communication to their families. Floyd also hid stolen guns for the gang. Floyd would eventually have a criminal career longer than either his brother or Clyde. For his help to the Barrow gang, Floyd was given two years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Page 27
