Jeff Guinn

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

  Bonnie crawled into bed with Blanche, and W.D. kept a lookout through the bedroom window while Clyde talked about a new plan he had to raid Eastham prison. He wanted his brother and sister-in-law to help, though he swore they wouldn’t be asked to do anything dangerous. Blanche refused to get involved and said Buck wouldn’t, either. After a while, Clyde, Buck, and W.D. went outside. At 4 A.M. they trooped back up the stairs. Clyde had a new proposal. He wanted Buck and Blanche to join them for a few weeks in Missouri. They’d rent an apartment in Joplin and just relax together. It would be like a family holiday. Bonnie chimed in. She told Blanche she was tired of sleeping in cars, and she wanted another girl to talk to. Clyde promised Blanche that he wouldn’t include Buck in any burglaries—they had enough money to last for a while. He’d even keep most of the guns locked in the trunk of the car so Blanche wouldn’t have to be around them. She and Bonnie could have fun fixing up the apartment. Blanche was adamant: she and Buck weren’t interested. But at dawn, just after Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. left, Buck told her he’d promised Clyde they’d go to Joplin. It would give Buck a chance to talk some sense into his kid brother. He was trying to save Clyde’s life. If Blanche still wouldn’t agree, then he’d go without her. She gave in. Buck said she could bring her dog.

  Clyde and Buck had worked out a plan to rendezvous a few days later at a motor court in Checotah, Oklahoma. Buck and Blanche, with Snow Ball in tow, made the trip in a 1929 Marmon sedan Buck bought from a Dallas acquaintance named Carl Beaty. They met Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. in Oklahoma as planned and formed a two-car caravan to Joplin. Bonnie rode part of the way with Buck and Blanche, chattering about how uncomfortable she felt any time she, Clyde, and W.D. drove through a town and there were cops around. When they got to Joplin, they rented cabins in another motor court to live in for a few days while Buck and Blanche looked around Joplin for a suitable apartment. Buck, Blanche, and Snow Ball took one cabin, while W.D. bunked in as usual with Clyde and Bonnie. At night they fixed supper in one of their kitchenettes. Blanche discovered that Bonnie was anything but a homebody. She disliked fixing meals and hated washing dishes. Blanche and Clyde did the cooking. Because they were settling in for a few days, they bought a greater variety of groceries than usual. In her memoir, Blanche described the fare: Buck and Bonnie liked pickled pig’s feet and olives. Clyde wanted french fries, and especially “English peas cooked with a lot of cream and pepper.” It was the sort of dish Clyde couldn’t enjoy while camping out in a car or sheltering with isolated farm families who barely had enough food for themselves, let alone guests. So he took the opportunity to gorge himself on the fancy pea recipe. Blanche recalled that “he ate [it] at almost every meal except breakfast.” At night after supper was over, Clyde, Buck, and W.D. would clean their guns and play poker. Bonnie didn’t mind having guns around. She just didn’t want to shoot them. Blanche hated guns and claimed she couldn’t figure out how poker was played, despite Buck’s coaching. She wasn’t the kind of person who tried very hard to fit in.

  On April 1, Buck and Blanche, using the pseudonym of Callahan, rented an apartment near the intersection of 34th Street and Oak Ridge Drive in Joplin. The exact, odd address was 33471/2 34th Street. It had two bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The apartment was in a fashionable part of town, and they paid a hefty $50 for a month’s lease on the place. For Clyde, Bonnie, W.D., and Buck, who’d lived so long in the squalor of West Dallas, these relatively extravagant digs must have seemed like paradise. The apartment was built over a two-door garage. Stairs inside the garage led up to the apartment. Harold Hill, who lived in an adjacent house, parked his car in the right side of the garage. Clyde parked his stolen Ford V-8 of the moment on the other side. There was no room for Buck’s Marmon, so he rented garage space in one of the adjacent houses. The neighborhood was exclusive enough for residents to employ a night watchman. Soon after they arrived, the Texas transients agreed to pay him a dollar a night to guard their apartment and garages, too. Clyde and Bonnie thought that was hilarious.

  The apartment was only minimally furnished, so the renters bought linens, blankets, pillows, and utensils. Playing house was a new experience and they enjoyed it, though Blanche believed she had to do more than her fair share of cooking, cleaning, and picking up. They stayed up late at night playing cards, then slept through the mornings. Because Blanche couldn’t or wouldn’t learn how to play poker, she amused herself with puzzles purchased from a nearby Kress’s five-and-ten-cent store. Soon she had Clyde hooked on them, too. On April 7, new legislation allowed beer sales for the first time since Prohibition became the law of the land thirteen years earlier. Clyde, Bonnie, W.D., and Buck celebrated by buying and drinking a case each night. Blanche didn’t have any beer. She wanted to go home to Texas before something bad happened and Buck got caught up again in a life of crime.

  Buck wasn’t ready to leave. He still believed he could talk Clyde into giving himself up. The brothers discussed it over and over. Clyde insisted he had no chance for clemency. If “the laws” caught him, he’d go to the electric chair. Buck argued that wasn’t necessarily the case. Raymond Hamilton had been convicted by a Hillsboro jury of John Bucher’s murder just a few days before Buck was pardoned. The jury was still undecided over the appropriate sentence for Raymond—a long prison sentence or the death penalty. If Raymond did end up being sent to a Huntsville prison farm instead of the electric chair, Buck said, Clyde could hope for the same kind of verdict. Clyde wasn’t buying it. After his awful experience at Eastham, he wasn’t willing to endure life as an inmate again. Buck kept trying. He wouldn’t accept what was clear to everyone else. Clyde preferred death to prison.

  While Buck pursued his fruitless debate, all five of them continued to live in the kind of comfort they’d never experienced before. They had indoor plumbing. Food was delivered right to the apartment. A laundry service came by each day to pick up soiled clothes and deliver freshly laundered ones. Clyde insisted that none of the deliverymen be allowed to enter the apartment. Bonnie or Blanche had to meet them on the staircase. Clyde also wanted the window blinds pulled shut at all times. Blanche kept the blinds up in the bedroom she shared with Buck. Some afternoons, she and Bonnie treated themselves to the movies or shopping trips to Kress’s. Blanche recalled in her memoir that the two women would return to the apartment “with our arms loaded with ashtrays, glassware, small picture frames, and anything else we saw that was pretty or that we wanted or needed, plus a lot of things we didn’t need.” Once they bought some costume jewelry, rings and earrings whose cut-glass settings vaguely resembled real diamonds. It was the kind of mindless, minor-league consumerism that a poor girl like Bonnie could never have enjoyed back in West Dallas.

  But those department store sprees along with grocery deliveries, laundry service, and cases of beer cost money, and despite what he’d told Blanche back on the Wilmer dairy farm, Clyde didn’t have an endless supply. So on several nights he and W.D. or he and Buck disappeared for a few hours. They were later connected to a series of robberies in the area. Buck’s pledge to go straight didn’t last three weeks beyond his release from prison. One night, he and Clyde even returned with several Browning Automatic Rifles, which they had pilfered from a National Guard armory. Blanche was appalled.

  On April 12, W. D. Jones stole a Ford V-8 roadster in Miami, an Oklahoma town about thirty miles west of Joplin. Clyde wanted a new car to replace the Ford V-8 he’d been driving. It wasn’t smart to stay in the same stolen car too long. They made a deal with their neighbor Harold Hill to park both the V-8 roadster and the V-8 sedan in the double garage under their apartment. Probably they promised Hill they’d be leaving soon, so he would only have to park his vehicle along the curb for a day or two. They didn’t realize it was too late. They were already under police surveillance.

  In the two weeks since they’d moved in, the Texans had kept mostly to themselves—a little girl named Beth, whom Bonnie befriended, was the exception. Their neighbors notic
ed that they often seemed to come and go late at night, which was unusual in that upper-middle-class section of Joplin. One afternoon, Clyde was in the garage cleaning a rifle, probably one of the BARs stolen from the armory, when he accidentally fired a quick burst of shots and the concussion reverberated beyond the garage walls. No one came to ask what had happened, but people in nearby houses heard it. A neighbor went to the police to complain. Officers began to keep an eye on the apartment. When the new V-8 roadster appeared, it was another warning sign. Joplin had been a hotbed for bootleggers, and the police knew their city was also home to several fencing operations specializing in stolen cars and guns. It seemed likely that the five strangers in the apartment on 34th Street were involved in something shady.

  On the night of April 12, after W.D. returned with the newly stolen roadster and negotiations with Hill to park it in the garage were complete, Clyde and Bonnie had a terrible fight. Bonnie thought it was stupid to bring another stolen car to the apartment when they were trying to keep a low profile, and Clyde didn’t like having his decisions questioned. Partly from stress, partly because they both had feisty streaks, they routinely argued, but this was one of the times when things turned violent. Blanche wrote that “he knocked her across [their] bedroom a couple of times but she got up and went back for more.” Eventually they made up as they always did, and Bonnie went to bed. Clyde sat up awhile longer talking with Buck. He finally convinced his big brother that he had no intention of surrendering to the cops. Clyde added that their holiday was over. They’d stayed in the apartment long enough. He was worried the laws might be on to them. Buck said he and Blanche would go back to Texas, but he wanted another day to get ready for the trip. Clyde suggested some motor courts where they might stop on the way home to Dallas.

  April 13 was a Thursday. Buck spent the morning getting his Marmon ready for the trip. He changed the oil and took it to a service station to fill up with gas. Around 4 P.M. Clyde and W.D. went out in the roadster, presumably to pull one more robbery for traveling money before they left Joplin. They left the V-8 sedan behind in the garage. Blanche packed, and Buck took a nap. Bonnie had just gotten out of bed—earlier, she’d said she didn’t feel well. Now she sat on the living room floor, idly rewriting a few verses of “Suicide Sal.” She was still wearing her nightgown and slippers. Bonnie asked if Blanche would boil an egg for her. Then they heard the Ford roadster out on the street, a surprise since Clyde and W.D. had been gone only a few minutes. But the car had developed engine trouble, and Clyde and W.D. decided to return to the apartment. Clyde pulled the roadster into the garage. They were just tugging the door down when another car suddenly veered into the driveway.

  Earlier that day, officers in the Joplin police force and the Missouri State Highway Patrol had decided to raid the apartment. Their best guess was that the five suspicious characters living there were selling bootleg liquor. Prohibition repeal had so far only reinstated beer as a legal alcoholic beverage in Missouri. A five-man squad was assembled, and the men drove to the apartment in two cars. Highway patrolmen G. B. Kahler and W. E. Grammer were in the lead auto. Joplin policemen Tom DeGraff and Harry McGinnis were in the second car. McGinnis, fifty-three, was a career cop who’d recently been named acting chief of Joplin detectives because his boss, Ed Portley, had been sick. Otherwise, Portley would have gone on the raid instead of McGinnis. Riding with McGinnis and DeGraff was Wes Harryman, a county constable. Harryman, forty-one, went along because the other lawmen needed an official with the authority to issue a warrant to search the premises. Harryman owned and operated a small farm outside town, and, like most Depression farmers lucky enough to hang on to their land, he still had to supplement his income. As a constable, he didn’t earn a salary. Instead, he was paid a few dollars for each warrant he served. Being invited to issue a warrant and come on a raid was an opportunity for Harryman. The officers were armed with only small-caliber handguns. None of the lawmen expected trouble.

  Arriving as Clyde and W.D. began lowering the garage door, Kahler swung his car along the curb just past the apartment while DeGraff pulled up right in the driveway, effectively blocking both Fords inside the garage. DeGraff yelled at Harryman to get inside the garage before the door was closed.

  Harryman drew his gun, leaped from the car, and tried to duck inside. He was met with blasts from a shotgun, probably Clyde’s. Harryman managed to fire one shot as he fell beside the driveway. The shotgun pellets had struck him in the shoulder and the neck, severing arteries. He bled to death as the fight raged on.

  McGinnis hopped out and fired three shots through the garage door’s glass window. W.D. was struck in the side by one of those shots or the single bullet fired by Harryman. Clyde fired back with his shotgun, and McGinnis was hit in the face, left side, and right arm, which was almost severed from his body. As McGinnis dropped in the driveway, DeGraff got out of the car. He snapped off a few shots, picked up McGinnis’s revolver, and ducked around the side of the garage. Kahler took cover behind his car and Grammer ran around the building, where he met DeGraff. DeGraff told him to go find a phone and call for backup.

  While Kahler and Clyde traded shots, W. D. Jones lurched upstairs as Buck ran down to help his brother. Bonnie and Blanche were bewildered, and only became more confused when W.D. appeared with blood soaking through his shirt. It was clear they’d have to run for it, and that fleeing on foot wasn’t an option. There was no way to know how many cops were outside. The apartment might be surrounded. But they had to get moving as quickly as possible. There was no time to gather their belongings. Driving out was the best bet, and they had the Ford V-8 sedan in the garage. But when Clyde and Buck opened the garage door in front of it, they realized the driveway was blocked by DeGraff’s car and McGinnis’s body. The women were ordered to get in the sedan. Blanche’s dress was spattered with W.D.’s blood. Bonnie was still in her nightgown. W.D. was bleeding heavily, but he tried to help Clyde push DeGraff’s car out of the way. Buck dragged McGinnis off to one side. Across the street, Kahler fired again. One shot hit Clyde in the chest. The bullet struck a button on his shirt. Luckily for Clyde, the lawman was firing a small-caliber pistol rather than a high-powered rifle, and the button absorbed much of the impact. The slug barely penetrated Clyde’s skin, and afterward Bonnie was able to tug it out with her fingers and a hairpin. Buck was slightly wounded, too—a spent slug bruised his chest. He grabbed a shotgun and joined Clyde in returning Kahler’s fire.

  In the middle of the gunfight, Blanche’s dog, Snow Ball, ran out of the garage and into the street. Blanche ran right after it, calling for the frightened mongrel to come back. Clyde ordered everyone else into the V-8 sedan. He revved the engine and rammed DeGraff’s car, shoving it out of the driveway. Their escape route was finally clear, and Clyde drove into the street. Someone, probably Buck, yanked Blanche into the car. Snow Ball kept running. No one knows what became of the dog.

  The battered Barrows didn’t flee under a hail of bullets. Kahler stopped shooting, probably realizing that bullets from his handgun couldn’t dent the panels of the sedan. DeGraff fired only four shots before ducking behind the house. Harryman was dead and McGinnis was dying. Grammer never fired his pistol at all. By the time reinforcements arrived, the gang was long gone.

  As soon as he felt they were clear of immediate pursuit, Clyde checked W.D.’s wound. The teenager was in tremendous pain and thought the bullet might still be inside him. They had no medical supplies, and couldn’t risk trying to have W.D. examined by a doctor. So Clyde trimmed a thin tree branch, wrapped cloth around it—possibly from Bonnie’s nightgown or Blanche’s dress—and poked the stick directly into the hole where the bullet had entered W.D.’s abdomen. When the stick protruded through another hole in W.D.’s back, they figured the slug had gone through his body. When they came to a service station, they stopped to buy gas and a packet of aspirin. The pills were the only immediate treatment W.D. received.

  Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, Blanche, and W.D. were in terrible strai
ts. They had a few guns, the ones they’d used in the Joplin shootout and some others Clyde had locked in the sedan. Besides the weapons, they had only the clothes they were wearing. Everything else, from their fancy suits and dresses to their cameras and Clyde’s guitar, had been abandoned back at the apartment. Two cops had gone down, both undoubtedly dead or dying. The Joplin police had surely sent out an all-points bulletin describing the shooters. Their relative anonymity in Missouri was over. The state was no longer a safe haven.

  Clyde headed back to Texas, probably more out of habit than anything else. He avoided Dallas, and at dawn the fugitives found themselves in Shamrock, a town about 95 miles east of Amarillo. Exhausted, wounded himself, Clyde had driven almost six hundred miles since the late afternoon firefight in Joplin. They found a dingy motor court to rest in. Bonnie and Blanche washed and dressed W.D.’s, Clyde’s, and Buck’s wounds. Blanche, hiding the spots of blood on her dress as best she could, walked to a nearby grocery store and bought some food. They ate and talked about what had happened. Blanche cried because now Buck was on the run again. After a few hours Clyde decided some cars parked nearby looked suspicious. They got back in the sedan and drove through the outskirts of Amarillo until after dark. Then the others waited while Clyde and Buck went into the city and robbed a store or service station that was never identified. Blanche wrote in her memoir that “the next day we got some clothes…. We drove so much and so fast, most of the day and night, sleeping only a few hours at a time. One of us always kept watch while the others slept. We traveled through New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, back through Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. When the money gave out, something was robbed. I don’t remember sleeping in a bed more than three or four times in the next two weeks.”