Clyde had crossed a moral line, too. He might claim that in Stringtown as in Hillsboro, murder occurred because other people made mistakes. According to Clyde, Raymond Hamilton was the one who insisted on stopping at the dance, just as Ted Rogers had fired the fatal shot in the Buchers’ store while Clyde waited peacefully outside. But at least in Hillsboro he’d been separate from the bloody action. In Stringtown, Clyde’s finger pulled a trigger. Counting Ed Crowder at Eastham Prison Farm in October 1931, Clyde had now been involved in three murders within the last eleven months. Yet Cumie noted in her memoir that the morning after he’d gunned down Eugene Moore, her son didn’t seem particularly concerned. Perhaps he had already grown too comfortable with killing.
The rest of the Barrows didn’t minimize the consequences to others from Clyde’s actions in Stringtown. Marie Barrow wrote in her unpublished memoir that “we felt extremely bad for those who were injured due to the things in which Clyde became involved…[Eugene] Moore left a young wife and a couple of small children, a fact that hit my mother extremely hard.” The family also knew that with the Stringtown killing, Clyde’s eventual fate was sealed: “All my brother could do now was to try to stay ahead of the pursuing forces of the law until the chase reached its inevitable conclusion.”
Clyde, too, may have understood his demise was inevitable, but he had no intention of allowing it to be immediate. He and Raymond needed to get far away from West Dallas and Oklahoma, where the search for them would be intense. He didn’t make the chivalrous gesture of leaving his girlfriend behind so she wouldn’t share the danger with him. Bonnie had sworn to stay with Clyde for better or worse, and he took her at her word. As soon as he’d had his meeting with Cumie, Clyde sent Raymond to collect Bonnie from her mother’s house.
Bonnie had spent the previous evening promising Emma that she really was through with Clyde, insisting that she’d learned her lesson in Kaufman. Bonnie laid the lies on thick, tossing in fictitious descriptions of the Wichita Falls café where she supposedly worked. Emma thought Bonnie looked worn out, and decided it was because of long hours on the job coupled with the stifling Texas summer heat. When Raymond came to pick her up about 8 A.M. on August 6, Bonnie met him outside so Emma wouldn’t realize she was getting a ride with Clyde’s criminal sidekick. It would be several months before Bonnie saw her mother again, and almost a year before they had the opportunity for another long, private conversation.
The death of Eugene Moore was the direct result of Clyde’s and Raymond’s terrible judgment in stopping at the Stringtown dance at all, let alone calling additional attention to themselves after they did. But loyalty was one of Bonnie’s most distinguishing characteristics. Even when Clyde made mistakes, in her mind it really wasn’t his fault. She constantly told family and friends that unrelenting persecution by “the laws” pressured Clyde into becoming a career criminal and multiple murderer: “They made him what he is today. He used to be a nice boy…. Folks like us haven’t got a chance.” Modern-day psychologists would call Bonnie an enabler.
Beginning on August 6, 1932, Bonnie Parker’s life became entwined completely with Clyde Barrow’s. After the tragic events in Stringtown, she was the one who suggested where they ought to go next to throw off pursuit. It marked the moment Bonnie began to evolve from mostly ornamental girlfriend into Clyde’s full-fledged partner in crime.
CHAPTER 11
Clyde and Bonnie on the Run
Millie Stamps, Emma Parker’s sister, lived just outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. On Saturday, August 13, she was surprised when a new Ford V-8 drove up and her niece Bonnie hopped out. Bonnie announced she’d come for a visit with her new husband, James White, and their friend, Jack Smith. Aunt Millie had been out of touch with her Dallas relations for years. For all she knew, Bonnie really was a newlywed out on a driving trip honeymoon, though it seemed odd that she and James would be bringing a friend along. Family hospitality dictated that she couldn’t turn them away, so Aunt Millie invited them to stay as long as they liked. It was working out just the way Bonnie planned.
She, Clyde, and Raymond had dithered for several days after reuniting on the morning of August 6. They knew they had to get far away from Dallas, where Clyde and Raymond were all too familiar to the police. They couldn’t follow the usual roads north and east—Oklahoma was swarming with posses searching for them. While they tried to come up with a plan, Clyde and Bonnie hid out again in the abandoned Grand Prairie farmhouse. Raymond had a separate hiding place—even in such a desperate time, he and Clyde weren’t getting along well enough to want to spend every hour in each other’s company.
During this nervous interim, Clyde and Bonnie managed a late-night meeting with Clyde’s family near the Houston Street Viaduct. Clyde’s sister Nell was surprised by her brother’s appearance. Clyde’s hair had been dyed a bright, unnatural shade of red by Bonnie, who Nell thought looked “very tired and worn” and “without her usual sparkle.” They talked a little about Stringtown. Clyde said he wasn’t certain whether he or Raymond fired the shot that killed Eugene Moore. He joked a little about needing a blond wig to disguise himself. Bonnie snuggled against Clyde’s shoulder. The late-night visit was a short one. Clyde was worried about being spotted by the cops.
When Bonnie suggested making a surprise visit to her aunt in New Mexico, Clyde liked the idea. There was no reason for the New Mexico police to be on the lookout for him and Raymond. They’d never committed any crimes in New Mexico, and communications between police in Texas and its neighboring state to the west were notoriously poor. Even better, road maps indicated that the highway from Dallas to Carlsbad ran mostly through deserted countryside. They would pass through very few towns, meaning there was little chance of getting spotted by suspicious local police.
It was 475 miles from Dallas to Carlsbad, and the road was packed dirt rather than paved asphalt. In Texas, the speed limit was 45 miles per hour, but Clyde routinely ignored speed limits. He drove, as always, in his stocking feet. The mutilation to his left foot may have prevented him from being able to properly feel the pedals while wearing a shoe. Even though Raymond and Bonnie were available to spell him behind the wheel, Clyde drove all the way to Carlsbad himself. He never liked to let anyone else drive. It was one more sign of his determination to be in control of everything.
Soon after her guests settled in, Aunt Millie became suspicious. Bonnie and her new husband were driving such a nice new car. How could they afford that kind of luxury vehicle? James White and Jack Smith seemed to have a lot of money between them, several hundred dollars at least—probably the remaining proceeds of the Neuhoff robbery, though Aunt Millie wouldn’t have known that. Plus, they had all these guns, and the two men took them outside to do some very loud, annoying target shooting. Clearly, Clyde hadn’t learned anything in Stringtown about unnecessarily calling attention to himself. Family loyalty was one thing, but Millie Stamps was a woman who prided herself on possessing the very highest moral character. Surreptitiously, she contacted Eddy County deputy Joe Johns and asked him to drop by.
There had been a recent rash of car thefts in and around Carlsbad and Roswell. Johns thought Millie Stamps’s niece and the two men with her might be involved. About 9 A.M. on August 14 he drove over and spotted the new Ford V-8 parked outside. That was enough for Johns to knock on the Stamps’s front door. His intention was to quiz the visitors about where they got the car. If their story didn’t check out, he would lock them up.
Bonnie answered the door. Johns asked to speak about the Ford with the two men who’d come to Carlsbad with her. Bonnie replied that the car was their property. Both men were getting dressed—she’d send them right out. Johns went over to inspect the V-8. He obviously didn’t believe the suspected car thieves presented any danger to him. Johns paid for that careless mistake. While he poked around the Ford instead of remaining on his guard, Raymond and Clyde exited the Stamps house through the back door. They circled around the house and got the drop on the deputy, threatening him wit
h a shotgun they’d found in a closet. They couldn’t use their own guns because they had locked them in the trunk of the Ford. Whichever one was holding the shotgun fired a warning shot. Johns surrendered without a fight.
Once again, Clyde had taken a lawman hostage and had to do something with him. He chose not to kill the deputy, but he couldn’t just let him go to spread the alarm. So Clyde, Bonnie, and Raymond forced Johns into the Ford at gunpoint, and Clyde drove east toward Texas. It was a habit Clyde was never able to break. No matter who was hunting him, no matter how close pursuit might be, Clyde always gravitated back to the state he knew best. That pattern, probably subconscious, would become even more pronounced, and thus more obvious to the law, in the months ahead. Now, with Johns as his hostage, he headed for the South Texas city of San Antonio.
In the early 1930s, three hundred miles even on paved highways was considered a full day’s driving. It was about 450 miles on rough, mostly unpaved roads from Carlsbad to San Antonio, and Clyde didn’t drive there directly. To throw off potential pursuit, he took several side roads, often relying on a road map so he wouldn’t become lost. He still reached San Antonio sometime on the night of the 14th.
A frenzied search was underway for them, and not only in New Mexico. Several people had heard the warning shot that Clyde or Raymond fired at Joe Johns outside Carlsbad. A few hours later, two truck drivers discovered a headless corpse ninety miles outside El Paso. Authorities immediately assumed it was Johns—the two fugitives from Carlsbad must have blown his head off. Often, New Mexico and Texas authorities had difficulty communicating, but in this case the word went east fast and clear: Millie Stamps of Carlsbad had identified her niece, Bonnie Parker of Dallas, in the company of two men who’d apparently murdered a New Mexico county deputy and driven away in a Ford V-8 with Texas plates. From the descriptions provided, Texas lawmen were able to fill in the blanks: the men were probably Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton, and now they’d killed another officer. Every cop in Clyde’s home state was on the alert for him.
In San Antonio, Clyde drove endlessly in the dark, trying to find another car to steal. The V-8 he was driving now looked battered rather than flashy. In the course of racing along rock-strewn dirt highways all day and night at speeds up to 70 or 80 miles an hour Clyde had torn loose both bumpers, and cementlike dried mud coated the windshield and door panels. At least his hostage had been cooperative. Johns even suggested alternate routes to avoid major cities like Odessa. Though the New Mexico lawman had no idea who his captors were—the names Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and Raymond Hamilton weren’t well known yet beyond the Texas border—he still took Clyde’s threats to kill him seriously. At one point Bonnie asked Johns how he liked being on the run. “You’ve had just twenty-four hours of it,” Bonnie told him. “We get 365 days of it every year.” All four passengers in the Ford were tired and hungry. Clyde had been willing to stop for gas, but not food.
About 5 A.M. on August 15, Clyde gave up looking for a car to steal. He wanted another of the new V-8 “flatheads” that had just been introduced by Ford. These beauties could outrun anything else on American roads. But there weren’t any to steal in San Antonio, at least not in the neighborhoods where Clyde was looking. So he steered the battered V-8 he was driving about fifteen miles out of the city. Then he ordered Deputy Johns out of the car, remarking, “You sure have caused us a lot of trouble.” He asked Johns not to raise any alarm for another hour—a naive request. Still, the deputy had to hike almost a mile to the nearest houses, and it took several tries before he found someone with a phone who could call the San Antonio police. One newspaper reported the next day that Johns “was mystified” when informed that his headless body had been discovered back in West Texas.
Police immediately set up roadblocks on the main highway between San Antonio and Dallas, figuring Clyde might be heading home by the most direct route. But he drove southeast instead, and during the afternoon he and Raymond found a suitable Ford V-8 to steal in Victoria, 120 miles from San Antonio. They didn’t abandon the mud-splattered, bumperless car they’d been driving since they originally left West Dallas for Carlsbad. Probably Clyde thought it would be a good idea to have two cars. There weren’t a lot of big cities between Victoria and Houston, where they were heading next. If they only had one vehicle and it broke down miles away from civilization, they’d be left on foot. Clyde and Bonnie certainly remembered trying to get away from the Kaufman County posse on mules. So Raymond drove the newly stolen Ford, following Clyde and Bonnie in their battered car. The two-vehicle caravan proceeded toward Houston, some 125 miles away.
But they hadn’t made a clean getaway while stealing the Ford in Victoria. The owners spotted them driving off, and a neighbor briefly gave chase. The police were called, and the description of the thieves matched that of the fugitives who’d kidnapped Deputy Joe Johns. When last seen in Victoria, they were speeding down Rio Grande Street, the most common route to Houston. It seemed likely that was where the trio was heading next. As fast as Clyde and Raymond might have been driving, telephone and telegraph messages still preceded them, warning police in towns along the way to be on the lookout for the newly stolen Ford. Besides descriptions of the occupants, its license plate number was provided.
The town of Wharton was sixty miles northeast of Victoria, about two-thirds of the way to Houston. Two Wharton policemen, identified in newspapers later as “Deputy Seibrecht and City Marshal Pitman,” decided to set a trap in case the car thieves–kidnappers came driving through. The Colorado River ran just west of town, and the highway crossed the river on a narrow bridge. Seibrecht pulled his car into a ditch on the west side of the bridge. Pitman parked on the east side. If Seibrecht saw the stolen car pass, he’d signal Pitman, who’d pull his car onto the road on the far side of the bridge. Seibrecht would swing his vehicle across the road on the other side, effectively trapping the stolen car and its occupants. It was a plan that almost worked.
Soon two Ford V-8s came roaring along the road; the second was the stolen car from Victoria. Seibrecht jumped up from the ditch and signaled to Pitman across the river. But in the lead car, the muddy, bumperless Ford, Clyde spotted Seibrecht and suspected a trap had been set. For the last two days, Clyde had demonstrated his ability to drive improbably long distances without rest. Now he proved he could turn on a dime at high speed. Slamming on the brakes, he came to a skidding stop just before the bridge, swung the Ford around and roared back in the opposite direction. Raymond Hamilton, following in the second Ford, wasn’t able to duplicate Clyde’s nifty U-turn. It took him several more seconds to stop, swing around, and drive away, enough time for Seibrecht to get off several shots. Raymond wasn’t hit. Since the Ford V-8s were far more powerful than the cars being driven by the Wharton cops, there was no chance of overtaking the three fugitives. The mud-coated Ford with no bumpers was found abandoned by the side of the road a few miles from the bridge. Police from New Mexico and Oklahoma soon arrived on the scene, and the next day’s paper specified that besides kidnapping and car theft, the Wharton escapees were wanted for murder in Stringtown and Hillsboro, for the robbery of the Neuhoff Packing Company in Dallas, “and for numerous other crimes.” Bonnie had always wanted to be famous. Now she, Clyde, and Raymond were—at least in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Their names and descriptions were printed in newspapers throughout the region and mentioned frequently on the radio. That’s how Emma Parker learned that Bonnie wasn’t working at a café in Wichita Falls.
Using back roads instead of main highways, Clyde, Bonnie, and Raymond drove back to Dallas. They hid out at the same abandoned farmhouse, and made at least one trip thirty-five miles west to Fort Worth, where they broke into the state guard armory and stole several powerful Browning Automatic Rifles. Clyde had been able to outdrive pursuit in Carlsbad and Wharton. He wanted to be certain he could outshoot the law, too, if it became necessary. This was the first, but far from the last, time Clyde broke into a state guard armory. Most Texas towns of a
ny size had armories for storing state-owned weapons intended to arm citizen militias in the event of widespread emergency. Legislative red tape kept the high-caliber weapons from being available on loan to outgunned local police. Clyde had easy access to them by breaking a few locks.
The new guns weren’t enough to convince Raymond to stick around with Clyde in Texas. He didn’t like Clyde to begin with, and his association with him had only resulted in being wanted for kidnapping and two murders, one of which occurred while Raymond was thousands of miles away. Raymond considered himself a gentleman bank robber, not a mistake-prone crook who stumbled from one bloody mishap to the next. About September 1 he told Clyde and Bonnie he was going back to Michigan for a while, and they drove Raymond almost a thousand miles north to Bay City. It was less a friendly gesture than an opportunity to get a break from local pursuit. After dropping Raymond off, they were in no hurry to go back to Texas. Clyde’s sister Marie noted in her memoir that “they lived off of small robberies that Clyde committed,” probably quick heists at small country stores and service stations. They stole several cars, too, driving them across state lines. When police searched one car stolen in Illinois and abandoned in Oklahoma, they found a medicine bottle in it that was traced back to Clyde. Even though Clyde had stolen cars and driven them across state lines before, he’d never been sloppy enough to leave behind evidence that irrefutably linked him to the crimes. It was a critical error, and one that would come back to haunt him. This car theft was the first federal crime charged to Clyde—bank robbery and murder, by law, were still the concerns of the individual states in which they took place. The authority of nonfederal lawmen was limited to their specific jurisdictions. Even the Texas Rangers had to cut off pursuit at the state line. Now Clyde could legally be pursued anywhere by agents for the U.S. Justice Department’s Division of Investigation headed by J. Edgar Hoover. It didn’t make an immediate difference—in September 1932, when the car stolen in Illinois was found in Oklahoma, Clyde was still a tiny criminal fish compared to whoppers like Pretty Boy Floyd and Alvin Karpis as far as Hoover and his feds were concerned. But the basis for unrestricted pursuit of him by federal agents was established. Clyde had passed one more criminal point of no return.
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