Jeff Guinn

by Untold Story of Bonnie;Clyde Go Down Together: The True

  A series of postcards kept the rest of the Barrow family generally apprised of Clyde and Bonnie’s Midwest wanderings. They didn’t sign the postcards or indicate where they were headed next, just in case the Dallas police were intercepting and reading Cumie and Henry’s mail. Most of Clyde’s previous trips outside his normal Texas-Oklahoma stomping grounds had been hectie—to Middletown, Ohio, after escaping from the Waco jail; driving north to Minnesota with Ralph Fults and Raymond Hamilton, looking for a bank to rob; the recent debacle in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Now his leisurely tour with Bonnie took on aspects of a vacation. The postcards they sent back to West Dallas told about drives along the Great Lakes, and described the skyscrapers in Chicago. For a change, they were having fun.

  Fun didn’t preclude practical considerations. Clyde and Bonnie needed places to stay, food to eat, clothes to wear, gas for their stolen cars, and money to pay for it all. They didn’t consider robbing a bank to be a good option. Any bank with money still left in its vaults would have a guard or two, a staff of tellers, and probably customers lined up in its lobby. Bonnie wasn’t taking an active role in holdups yet, and Clyde couldn’t simultaneously hold people at gunpoint, crack a safe, and handle a getaway car. He could rob shops in small rural communities without needing help. Besides, any robbery attempt on a big city bank or major business would draw much more attention from the local law than the relatively insignificant holdup of mom-and-pop grocery stores or service stations out in the country. The downside of small-time stickups was that they needed to be repeated every few days. Takes of $5 or $10 didn’t finance road expenses long, even in the Depression.

  Beginning with this trip, Clyde and Bonnie liked to stay at motor courts, a recent innovation in travel lodging. Since the end of the First World War, more Americans were taking advantage of cheaper cars and improved roads to drive themselves on trips for business and recreation, and they needed convenient, inexpensive places to stay along the way. First in the less-populated Southwest, then all over the country, roadside “auto camps” began to spring up—cleared areas where, for a few cents, travelers could park their cars for the night. Often they would pitch tents beside their vehicles and cook dinner over a campfire. By the late 1920s, these had evolved into “cabin camps,” offering rudimentary shacks and communal restrooms. Within a few years, coinciding almost exactly with the time Clyde and Bonnie began their brief era of roaming banditry, cabin camps morphed into “motor courts.” These featured stand-alone cottages with bathrooms and carports. Besides beds, the cottages had other homelike amenities—rugs, bureaus, tables, and sometimes even kitchens. With rental fees of about a dollar a day, they were pricey enough to keep out completely impoverished riffraff, but still affordable to rank-and-file travelers. It was pleasant for Clyde and Bonnie to check into a motor court under assumed names and enjoy indoor plumbing and beds with clean sheets. There was one more advantage—because the motor courts were always beside major roads and usually some distance from downtown traffic congestion, if the need arose they offered better options for quick getaways than hotels in the middle of bustling cities.

  But often when Clyde and Bonnie found themselves on an isolated back road at the end of the day there wasn’t the option of sleeping in a comfortable motor court. In these instances, they looked for farmhouses and asked whoever lived there for permission to spend the night. Particularly in rural areas during the Depression, it was considered almost mandatory for those lucky enough to have roofs over their heads to share their food and homes with passing strangers. There was a pervading sense that, except for the rich, everyone else was caught up in a common struggle to survive. In their flashy cars, dressed in Sunday clothes, Clyde and Bonnie clearly weren’t run-of-the-mill hobos angling for a handout. But the farm families they approached didn’t ask for any more personal information than whatever made-up story their visitors chose to share. Clyde and Bonnie always paid for their overnight room and board, sometimes with a dollar or two, more often with a box of food purchased from a nearby store or another present of some kind. Clyde occasionally reimbursed rural hosts with the gift of a shotgun or pistol. Certainly even the least observant among them had suspicions, but it didn’t matter. Most of these families were so poor themselves that money or food was a godsend. And, though Clyde and Bonnie were clearly on the run, farmers struggling to protect their property from foreclosure generally had a low opinion of the government and the law. By the middle of 1932, one out of every eight farms in the United States had been foreclosed because of mortgage or tax delinquencies. It was unlikely any of Clyde and Bonnie’s farmer hosts would turn them in. But just to be certain, they rarely stayed with any family for more than a day.

  Bonnie enjoyed these overnight visits. She was always sociable, and with her natural vivaciousness and knack for lively conversation she made friends easily with everyone she met. Clyde was moodier. Sometimes he didn’t feel like talking and failed to make a good impression on his host families. Bonnie always did. She particularly made a fuss over children. Often, she’d coax Clyde into giving kids rides on the running board and bumpers of their gleaming stolen cars. For many youngsters living on isolated farms, it was the first time they’d seen such a fancy automobile, let alone had a chance to ride in or on one.

  But there were also times when no motor courts or farmhouses were available, and then Clyde and Bonnie had to camp out in their car. They’d pull off the road, often driving through thick brush until they felt safely out of sight. Whenever possible, Clyde tried to park by a creek so there would be water for bathing. Even though the nice seats in the big cars he stole were more comfortable to sleep on than the hard ground, they still weren’t as good as a bed. Bugs were a constant irritant, and Bonnie was petrified of snakes. If she thought there was even a remote possibility of one nearby, she wouldn’t get out of the car. She was also afraid of thunder and lightning. Because a fire might draw unwanted attention, their camp meals were usually cold—crackers, Vienna sausages, sardines, cans of beans in gluey tomato sauce. Bonnie hated the primitiveness of it—relieving herself behind bushes was hardly the glamour she craved—and annoyed Clyde by complaining and occasionally consoling herself with bootleg whiskey. Clyde liked to drink himself, but whenever they camped out he tried to remain as alert as possible. Even in states such as Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas where they weren’t as notorious, there was always the possibility that some passing lawman might spot their camp and try to run them in as vagrants. When Bonnie whined and drank, it got on Clyde’s nerves. They had arguments that occasionally escalated into hitting. Bonnie swung at Clyde as often as he did at her.

  Mostly, he did his best to keep her happy. Clyde even stole a typewriter for Bonnie; sometimes while he drove she’d sit with it in the back seat, tapping out new poetry and fresh versions of “Suicide Sal.” Bonnie and Clyde both liked to dress in clean, fancy clothes, and on this and all their subsequent trips they anchored their otherwise nomadic lifestyle around towns with dry cleaners. They would drop off several suits and dresses, spend a few days in the surrounding countryside, then come back to pick up the freshly laundered clothes. Whenever their wardrobes needed replacing, Clyde would give his brother L.C. and sister Marie money at family meetings, then send them to shops in downtown Dallas. L.C. especially loved buying suits for Clyde in stores near public bulletin boards displaying his wanted posters.

  In October, Clyde and Bonnie began a gradual return to Texas. They both wanted to see their families again, and it had been several months since the shooting of Eugene Moore in Stringtown. Maybe the heat among the cops back home had abated. They lingered awhile in Kansas. The reason was never recorded, but Clyde probably liked the long, straight stretches of highway. They finally arrived in West Dallas on Halloween. As Clyde drove past the Barrow service station on Eagle Ford Road, he tossed out an empty Coke bottle with a note inside. It gave a time and place outside town where he wanted the family to meet him that night. As soon as it was dark, Clyde and Bonnie made a quick
stop at Emma Parker’s house. Bonnie took just a few minutes to tell her mother she was fine, hurrying away before Emma could launch into a lecture on the foolishness of being with Clyde. Emma and Bonnie’s sister, Billie, weren’t invited along to the Barrow gathering—the two families weren’t in constant touch yet, as they would be later on. Then Clyde whisked Bonnie off to the isolated spot outside town that he’d selected as a meeting place. Henry, Cumie, Nell, and Marie were there. They had news for Clyde and Bonnie, none of it good: Clyde’s younger brother, L.C., was in jail on suspicion of car theft, and Clyde was wanted for another murder.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Price of Fame

  In 1932, most Texas journalists were not about to let facts get in the way of a good story. Newspaper circulation throughout the state was down, in some smaller cities by as much as half—people hard-pressed to feed their families often weren’t willing to spend a nickel during the week or a dime on Sunday for a newspaper. Advertising revenues had dropped almost as precipitously. Fewer stores bought newspaper ads touting sales because there weren’t enough potential customers to buy the featured products. What even the most impoverished were tempted by instead was entertainment, anything that could even briefly take their minds off their considerable, ongoing troubles. Texas newspapers weren’t going to survive featuring stories about more farm foreclosures and the damage done by the latest dust storms. They needed to entice readers with tales of high adventure and preferably the exploits of colorful criminals, the same themes that kept Depression-impoverished audiences packing movie theaters. The silver screen had Jimmy Cagney. Now, many Texas newspapers hitched their fortunes to Clyde Barrow.

  Two murders—in Hillsboro on April 30 and in Stringtown on August 5—plus the kidnapping of a New Mexico deputy and a subsequent high-speed, long-distance drive that included escaping the bridge trap in Wharton gave reporters plenty of colorful material to embellish further. Clyde became “the Southwest’s will-o’-the-wisp bandit.” He was always willing “to shoot it out when capture threatens.” One newspaper would print something outrageous and others would reprint the story, until by repetition it became accepted as part of the ever-expanding library of entertaining Barrow lore. Readers of Texas newspapers were treated to colorful accounts of John Bucher’s last moments. As he fell with Clyde’s bullet in his heart, “Mrs. Bucher ran toward her husband,” only to be warned “get back, or I’ll give you some of the same.” In Stringtown, Sheriff Maxwell supposedly admonished Clyde for drinking by calling out, “Here, you can’t do that.” Clyde’s reply, according to the papers, was “We can’t, can’t we?” followed by “a blast of gunfire.” Readers might have wondered why such quotes and descriptions weren’t attributed to specific witnesses, but, just like the reporters who wrote the stories, most of them valued entertainment more than truth.

  Playing fast and loose with facts about Clyde wasn’t confined to journalists. Police reports got lots of things wrong, too, either through careless distribution of erroneous information—one federal wanted poster for Clyde listed his female companion as “Mrs. Roy Harding”—or else the urge to make their own fleeting encounters with Clyde seem more heroically life-or-death than they actually were. In Wharton on August 15, 1932, two deputies fired shots at cars driven by Clyde and Raymond Hamilton as they approached the bridge over the Colorado River. The fugitives never fired back. They had all they could do to get their vehicles turned around while bullets fired by the lawmen buzzed past them. But that wasn’t the story told in an August 30 bulletin issued by Wharton County sheriff J. C. Willis to “All Peace Officers in the United States” warning them to be on the lookout for Clyde and Raymond. According to Willis, the bloodthirsty duo wheeled into Wharton and “tried to kill one of my deputies…. They abandoned a V8 Ford coupe which they had stolen at Grand Prairie, Texas after shooting at our deputy sheriff.” Willis concluded his inaccurate message by pleading, “Wire all information to me collect and please make every effort to arrest these parties and stop their running over the country shooting officers wherever they go.”

  Such reports were the basis for additional inaccurate newspaper articles. Stories about the Wharton escape dutifully reported that Clyde and Raymond fired the first shots there, more proof for readers that they were trigger-happy in the extreme. Coupled with the reports that Clyde drove incredible distances at high speeds in his stolen cars—that much, at least, was true—people all over Texas had plenty of cause to believe that Clyde might pop up anywhere, anytime, probably robbing and definitely shooting as he went.

  When Raymond Hamilton was included in the newspaper stories about Clyde, he inevitably received second billing. He was the “pal of Barrow.” Clyde had already served a term in Huntsville, while Raymond had just been in a county jail for car theft. It was Clyde’s mug shot that Dallas police always passed around first. Bonnie was often mentioned in the articles, but almost always as “a Dallas girl” or Clyde’s “frequent companion” rather than by name. It wasn’t because the cops didn’t know who she was—her aunt, Millie Stamps, had seen to that. Rather, it was another example of Texas chauvinism. A woman wasn’t considered strong-minded enough to be a part of criminal activities through her own choice. If Bonnie wasn’t being forced to ride along with Clyde, then she was just a silly, love-addled girl who couldn’t be expected to know better.

  So everywhere in Texas, and in parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico because of their well-publicized crimes there, Clyde and Raymond and Bonnie were often what people talked about in barbershops and on porches after evening meals. It didn’t stop when Raymond went back to Michigan and Clyde and Bonnie took their two-month Midwest working vacation. Innumerable holdups and several shootings back in Texas were still blamed on them. When two service stations were robbed in Lufkin, when a Piggly-Wiggly grocery was knocked off in Abilene, Clyde and Raymond were immediately identified as the prime suspects. When Sheriff John C. Moseley was shot in Tulia a few months later, it seemed to witnesses that three persons were involved, and “officers investigating the affray suspected that one of the three fugitives might be a woman.” Nobody realized that Raymond had split off from Clyde and Bonnie. Even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have cared. Clyde was short and scrawny with light brown hair, average-looking enough so that anyone fresh from the shock of witnessing a violent crime might make an honest mistake in picking him out from mug shots. And in such cases, eyewitnesses were usually the sole means of identifying and convicting perpetrators. Fingerprinting had been a tool in crime investigation since the 1920s, and the fingerprints of Clyde, Raymond, and Bonnie were all on file from their previous arrests. But few small towns had the capacity to dust store door handles and service station cash boxes for prints. Guesswork was far more common than even the most basic forensics. So on October 11, 1932, when a butcher in Sherman, Texas, was brutally murdered during a robbery at the store where he worked, police and reporters were quick to assume it was the bloody work of Clyde Barrow.

  At around 6:30 P.M., a young man entered Little’s Grocery. He asked Homer Glaze, the store’s clerk, and Howard Hall, the shop butcher, for a few items before pulling a gun and demanding that they hand over the money in the cash register. There wasn’t much—$60 was the amount later reported. If the bandit had arrived just a few minutes earlier, he might have intercepted the store owner taking most of the day’s receipts over to the bank. Instead, he scooped up the money that remained and ordered Glaze and Hall outside. According to Glaze, Hall began arguing out on the sidewalk and was shot several times at close range. He died an hour later. The gunman tried to shoot Glaze, too, but his gun jammed. He ran down the street and drove away with another man in a large black sedan.

  When police arrived, Glaze described the killer as about five feet, six inches tall and twenty to twenty-five years old. The Sherman cops circulated the description, and the Dallas police came sixty miles north with mug shots of Clyde. Glaze identified him from these as the assailant who’d shot and killed Howard Hall. Clyde
was further implicated when Walter Enloe, a Grayson County deputy sheriff, said he’d just seen Clyde in Sherman, too. L.C. Barrow was in the county jail there, awaiting a grand jury hearing on a charge of car theft. According to Enloe, on the afternoon of October 11, Clyde came to the jail to visit his kid brother. Apparently, Enloe didn’t ask to see any identification and let the renowned killer come right in. He identified Clyde afterward from the Dallas police’s mug shots. The Grayson County grand jury added charges for a third murder to the rapidly expanding list of alleged crimes on Clyde’s wanted posters, and the sheriff’s office offered a new $200 reward for information leading to his capture.