Jeff Guinn

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

  They were wise to keep moving. Before, they only had to worry about being spotted by lawmen in Texas and parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico. Now, cops all over the country were on the lookout for them. Thanks to a plethora of damning evidence they left behind in Joplin, the Barrow Gang wouldn’t be limited to a regional reputation anymore.

  In the aftermath of the Joplin shootout, city police swarmed into the apartment at 33471/2 34th Street. Wes Harryman was pronounced dead on the scene, and Harry McGinnis was rushed to the hospital, where he would die of his wounds six hours later. The mood of the investigating officers was grim, and it only got grimmer as they made their first discovery—a cache of guns in the garage. The arsenal included four rifles, a shotgun, a pistol, and “an automatic rifle similar to a sub-machine gun.” It was a BAR, a weapon so unfamiliar to rank-and-file city policemen that the Joplin cops didn’t know what it was. Clearly, the gunmen who shot Harryman and McGinnis weren’t run-of-the-mill bootleggers.

  In one bedroom of the apartment was a purse, and its contents provided the first proof of the identity of the fugitives. There was a marriage license for Buck and Blanche, the title to a 1929 Marmon purchased from Carl Beaty, and a criminal pardon issued to Buck by Texas governor Miriam Ferguson. The Joplin police immediately contacted their counterparts in Dallas County, where Smoot Schmid ordered deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton to rush to Missouri and offer whatever assistance they could. The Texas cops brought mug shots of Buck Barrow and his brother Clyde, whom they believed must have been in Joplin, too.

  There were nice clothes left in the apartment, lots of them, most packed in suitcases, which indicated the felons had been getting ready to leave. Several glittering rings and sets of earrings were assumed to be diamond jewelry stolen recently in nearby Neosho. Somebody had abandoned a guitar, and on a living room table the officers found several scribbled sheets of poetry. The subject matter appalled them. The Joplin Globe reported the next morning that “the poem entitled Suicide Sal” was “morbid and gangster.” There were also cameras and rolls of undeveloped film. The film was sent to a laboratory for immediate processing.

  Meanwhile, the Joplin police sent out bulletins urging lawmen in neighboring counties and states to be on the lookout for Buck and Clyde Barrow. Also identified were Blanche Caldwell, whose name appeared with Buck’s on the marriage license, and “the woman with Clyde Barrow [who] has tentatively been identified as Bonnie Parker.” None of the police reports or newspaper articles mentioned W. D. Jones at all.

  In its edition published on April 14, the day after the shootout, the Joplin Globe reported that “Buck Barrow did virtually all the shooting from the garage,” and that the fugitives had escaped because their car “was too fast for the pursuing equipment of officers, who were quickly outdistanced.” The Joplin police obviously didn’t want the public to know that there hadn’t been any immediate pursuit. Buck, according to the story, was the ringleader of a particularly vicious Texas gang that included his younger brother. A day later, after Alcorn and Hinton arrived to brief their Joplin counterparts on the real hierarchy on the Barrow Gang, a “Wanted for Murder” poster was printed and distributed by the Joplin police. It offered $600 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the Barrow boys. Clyde’s mug shots were prominent, placed above Buck’s. He was described as “very dangerous, his record shows that he has killed at least three or four men,” while Buck, demoted to supporting status, merited only “this man was pardoned from the Texas Penitentiary on March 23, 1933.”

  That same day the police got back processed prints from the undeveloped roles of film, and these were revelatory. Previously, the only photos of the fugitives anyone had seen were mug shots of Clyde and Buck from Texas. Now, they had dozens of pictures, candid ones not only of the Barrow boys, but also of the women and one still unidentified man with them—W. D. Jones. In the photos the male desperadoes struck all sorts of poses, often leaning against their car and always dressed in snappy suits. Shots of the car were quite helpful—they clearly showed the Texas license plate of a Ford V-8 sedan. That made it easy to trace the car as one stolen several weeks earlier in Marshall, Texas.

  The best photos—the ones certain to attract public attention and therefore make it easier to get tips on the gang’s whereabouts—featured one of the women. Dallas County deputy Ted Hinton said it was Bonnie Parker. In one snapshot she held a grinning Clyde Barrow at mock gunpoint. In another, she propped one foot on the fender of the V-8 sedan—a very unladylike posture—and then compounded the shock value by waving a handgun that she also brandished or wore in several other pictures. It was quickly identified as the one stolen back in late January from Springfield motorcycle patrolman Thomas Persell. Dallas, Marshall, Joplin, Springfield—the police began to get an idea of just how wide-ranging the Barrow Gang was. Then there was the most noxious detail of all about this particular photo. Bonnie Parker had a cigar between her lips. Decent women puffed decorously on cigarettes, taking care to never actually inhale. Bonnie Parker, companion of multiple murderer Clyde Barrow, not only dangled a cigar insolently from the corner of her mouth, she was brazen enough to be photographed doing it.

  The photographs were made public on Friday, April 15, in the Joplin Globe and on a new wanted poster that featured a photo of Clyde with Bonnie and didn’t mention Buck at all. But Bonnie’s name was on it, right next to Clyde’s. Maybe Clyde’s nondescript mug shots resembled those of innumerable other scrawny, Depression-era bandits, but his pictures with Bonnie were unique. The Joplin Globe printed three of the photos on its front page—Clyde with Bonnie, Clyde himself, and Clyde with Buck.

  These and other captured pictures of the gang weren’t printed exclusively in the Joplin press. Many Depression-era newspapers subscribed to newfangled “wire services,” which could electronically transmit stories and photographs. The Joplin Globe sent its Barrow Gang photos out on the wire, and they triggered a widespread sensation. Plunging circulation was a concern common to newspapers across the nation—publishers in Texas weren’t the only ones mandating more stories pandering to the public’s preference for entertainment over endless economic bad news. Movie stars, sports heroes, and colorful criminals were preferred subjects. Possibilities in the latter category were limited. Few real-life villains had the same roguish charisma that Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson brought to movie screens. Al Capone was clearly a barbaric thug. Ma Barker was a dumpy middle-aged woman. John Dillinger had matinee-idol good looks and Pretty Boy Floyd had the best possible nickname, but the Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars with the most titillating trademark of all—illicit sex. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were young and unmarried. They undoubtedly slept together—after all, the girl smoked cigars. Whether they’d even heard of the term or not, the Freudian implications did not escape journalists or their readers. That made it easy, when writers exaggerated Clyde’s and Bonnie’s exploits, for readers to buy into far-fetched stories about these young criminal lovers.

  And such stories weren’t published only in newspapers. In the early 1930s, magazines devoted to garish, fictionalized descriptions of criminals and crimes hit newsstands and became immensely popular. They served the same purpose as the dime novels of the previous generation, only with bigger type and more photographs. Many of these magazines promoted veracity in their titles—True Detective, True Crime—and delivered the opposite. Their contents were generally overwrought and with little if any basis in fact, but millions of readers didn’t mind. As soon as they saw the photos of Clyde and Bonnie, editors of the crime magazines didn’t hesitate. They wanted to cram as many Barrow Gang stories into their publications as possible before the cops inevitably caught the kids and ruined a good story line. The Joplin shootout took place on April 13, 1933. The photos went out on the national news wires on April 15. Just weeks later, Clyde Barrow was featured in True Detective Mysteries. It was only a short profile with his Dallas mug shot in “The Line-Up,” a monthly listing of eight fugiti
ves selected by the magazine for special attention, but longer, more garish stories with accompanying graphics and photos took longer to produce. Eventually, multi-page features on Clyde’s and Bonnie’s supposed exploits would be ubiquitous in the crime publications. But that still didn’t complete the flood of Barrow Gang–related publicity.

  Bonnie Parker had always wanted to be in the movies, and suddenly she was. Unlike her lifelong fantasy, however, she didn’t appear onscreen as the star of a drama or musical. Instead, Bonnie and Clyde were featured in newsreels, short presentations about real individuals and current events that played in theaters prior to feature films. Camera crews went to Joplin and recorded footage of the apartment and interviews with neighbors and police. In the months ahead, there would be newsreel coverage in the wake of almost every shooting or holdup involving the Barrow Gang. Bonnie and Clyde were always the focus. Other members of the gang were considered inconsequential. Audiences settling in to watch Cagney or Robinson pretend to be villains in their latest feature films were treated beforehand to glimpses of what actual outlaws supposedly looked and acted like. The newsreels helped sell tickets and popcorn, and in the minds of many Americans they elevated Clyde and Bonnie into celebrities on a par with the most popular movie stars.

  With their celebrity came controversy. The combined newspaper, crime magazine, and newsreel coverage of Clyde and Bonnie managed to simultaneously demonize and deify them. Some perceived the couple as despicable hoodlums with no respect for human life and property. But to many others, they were heroes. True, they robbed banks and shot it out with lawmen, killing some in the process. But in 1933 bankers and law enforcement officials, widely perceived to have no sympathy for decent people impoverished through no fault of their own, were considered the enemy by many Americans. For them, Clyde and Bonnie’s criminal acts offered a vicarious sense of revenge. Somebody was sticking it to the rich and powerful.

  Without Bonnie, the media outside Texas might have dismissed Clyde as a gun-toting punk, if it ever considered him at all. With her sassy photographs, Bonnie supplied the sex appeal, the oomph, that allowed the two of them to transcend the small-scale thefts and needless killings that actually comprised their criminal careers. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of the next several months most people who read newspapers, bought crime magazines, or went to the movies learned all about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, or at least thought they did. In the weeks immediately following Joplin, Clyde and Bonnie along with Buck, Blanche, and W.D. lived like animals—sleeping in their car in the woods, bathing in creeks, letting bullet wounds heal themselves, and fearing attack or capture every time a twig snapped or a passing car slowed. But Americans began to imagine them in entirely different circumstances.

  “Their whole image was one of glamour,” recalls former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Jim Wright, who grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and was eleven when he first saw the photos of Bonnie and newsreels featuring the Barrow Gang, and read stories about them in True Detective. “You rather imagined them holed up in some upscale hotel. They always dressed perfectly, wielding guns in a deadly manner, coolly evading capture against all odds. It was a very romantic existence we felt they must enjoy. And even if you did not approve of them, you still would have to envy them a little, to be so good-looking and rich and happy.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Shooting Stars

  In 1933, Miss Sophia Stone of Ruston, Louisiana, was employed as her parish’s “home demonstration agent,” a fancy term for a job teaching local residents basic household money-saving techniques like how to preserve and can fruit. She was featured on local radio broadcasts, which made her something of a celebrity. On April 27, exactly two weeks after the Barrow Gang’s narrow escape in Joplin, she and Dillard Darby, the local undertaker, were relaxing on the porch of their boardinghouse after lunch. Stone, a very proper single lady concerned about her reputation, emphasized later to reporters that the two were not engaged in any inappropriate behavior—Darby was married, and she was being courted by a man named Cook. They were just casual friends enjoying a postprandial chat. Both Stone’s Ford and Darby’s Chevrolet were parked along the curb. Suddenly another Ford roared down the street and screeched to a stop by Darby’s car. A young man hopped out, got into the Chevy and sped away, followed by the first car. It all happened in a matter of seconds. It wasn’t necessary for the thief to waste any time hot-wiring the car. Darby had left his keys in the ignition. The undertaker rushed from the porch and managed to get a foot on the running board, but the thief stepped on the gas and Darby couldn’t hang on. Stone told Darby to get into her Ford, and they tore out after the stolen Chevy.

  Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche thought W. D. Jones would be right in front of them as they raced north, but somehow they lost sight of him. Clyde was irritated—they needed a second car, and this was supposed to be a quick, simple job preparatory to a bigger one. Once the Chevy was secured, Clyde intended to rob the Ruston bank. Now W.D. and the Chevrolet had vanished on the web of backcountry roads and they’d have to drive around looking for him. The Ruston police had enough time now to be on full alert—so much for robbing the bank there. Clyde didn’t find W.D., but he did spot the Ford coupé that had followed the Chevy out of Ruston. Stone and Darby lost W.D. around the small town of Hico, and they’d decided to head back home when Clyde roared up behind them. After ordering them out of Stone’s coupé, he asked why they had been following the Chevrolet. Darby snapped, “Because it’s my car.” Clyde lost his temper and hit the undertaker on the head with the butt of his pistol. When Darby staggered back to his feet, Clyde ordered him into the front seat of the Barrow Gang’s Ford. Buck and Blanche were in the back seat. Bonnie, in a bad mood herself, cursed at Stone and instructed her to climb into the front, too. It was crowded up there with four people. Darby’s head was bleeding from a superficial wound, and ammunition clips kept spilling out of the glove compartment onto their laps. That made Clyde even angrier, and he told Stone to hold the clips. There was no room for someone to move to the back seat. Besides Buck and Blanche, it was crammed with rifles. After Joplin, one of Clyde’s first priorities had been to restock the gang’s arsenal.

  They looked a while longer for W.D. and the stolen Chevrolet, but eventually gave up. Clyde drove north over the state line and into Arkansas. Sophia Stone wasn’t impressed with her captors. She said later that they were dressed shabbily and smelled bad, clearly the result of living in their car for the previous two weeks. Bonnie in particular always prided herself on looking nice—her bad mood might have been aggravated by embarrassment at Stone and Darby seeing her looking so slovenly. The ride was tense for everyone. Clyde drove at breakneck speed. Stone later estimated it at 90 miles an hour, unheard of on rough country roads. A few times Clyde wondered out loud about killing his prisoners, and Buck goaded him by asking, “What are you waiting for?” Stone thought Buck might be drunk. Finally Clyde told Stone and Darby that he’d release them unharmed if they didn’t try anything. Blanche wrote in her memoir that Clyde informed the two exactly who their captors were. Like everywhere else, the newspapers in Louisiana had been full of stories about the Barrow Gang. The hostages were suitably intimidated.

  Even in a bad mood, Bonnie was too social to let an opportunity for conversation pass. She asked Stone and Darby what they did for a living. When Darby said he was a mortician, Bonnie laughed and asked him to promise to be the gang’s embalmer. Stone told reporters later that when she mentioned she gave cooking lessons, Bonnie asked her to describe some of the recipes. By the time Clyde stopped outside the Arkansas town of Waldo in the late afternoon, everyone was on reasonably friendly terms. Clyde ordered Stone and Darby to get out, drove a few yards, backed up, and asked if they had enough money to get home. When Darby said he only had a quarter, Clyde, perhaps feeling remorseful about cracking him on the skull, handed the undertaker a five-dollar bill. As the gang drove away, Blanche thought she saw Darby copy down the license numb
er of their Ford.

  From there, Clyde decided to take a roundabout route back to Louisiana that passed through Hope, Arkansas. On their way through Hope they were spotted and followed by a police car, possibly because Darby had already reported their license number, more likely because small-town lawmen all over the region were on the lookout for a Ford V-8 and the now infamous Barrow Gang. Many local lawmen earned most of their income by claiming rewards for capturing criminals, and the rewards for Clyde in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri were widely known to cumulatively total around $1,000. One of the Hope cops stuck a rifle out of his car window. The police car was close to the Ford, and Buck raised a BAR. With such superior firepower he could easily have blown the pursuers right off the road. Instead, Buck held his fire. Clyde gunned the car’s powerful V-8 engine and outran the cops. Despite what many newspaper stories and police reports claimed, the Barrow Gang always preferred flight to shootouts whenever both options were available.

  Nobody wrote about Buck’s and Clyde’s act of mercy toward the Hope cops until it was mentioned in Blanche’s memoirs decades later, but there were plenty of stories about the kidnapping of Sophia Stone and Dillard Darby. For one thing, it was the first confirmed sighting of Clyde and Bonnie since the highly publicized Joplin shootout. For another, Stone was eager to supply reporters with colorful accounts of the terrible abuse she had suffered during her five-or six-hour ordeal. Interviewing Stone the day after she’d been taken hostage, the Ruston Daily Leader reported that Bonnie Parker “cursed her and slugged her in the back of the neck with her pistol butt…. Miss Stone sustained no severe injuries from the blow inflicted by Bonnie’s gun as the weapon struck her on the back of the neck where a heavy braid of hair was entwined.” This happened, Stone testified, after Clyde used his gun to strike Darby. It made for colorful copy. Three days later, Darby’s Chevrolet was found abandoned in eastern Arkansas a hundred miles from Ruston, but there was no sign of the fifth gang member who had stolen it. For Clyde and Bonnie—as well as the police—it was as though W. D. Jones had vanished.