Jeff Guinn

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

  Buck was much less forthcoming about the identity of the man who’d been with him when Humphrey was killed. All he would tell Maxey and Salyers was that it wasn’t Clyde. The as yet unidentified fifth member of the gang was of considerable interest to the authorities. Back in Dallas, Schmid was asked to question Henry Barrow about who it might be. Henry knew full well it was W. D. Jones—Clyde had invited the teenager to join his gang at the Barrow family gathering on Christmas Eve, 1932. But Henry played dumb and replied, “I just can’t figure out who he is.” The cops didn’t give up. Unfortunately for W.D., his days of anonymity were numbered.

  By the time Cumie, L.C., Emma, Billie Jean, and May Turner arrived on Wednesday, July 26, Buck had taken a turn for the worse. As the doctors predicted, pneumonia set in. Buck was delirious whenever he was conscious, and thought Billie Jean Parker was Blanche. He gripped her hand and begged her not to leave him. Emma tried to lend moral support to Cumie, but her main concern was Bonnie. Newspaper stories about the Dexfield Park shootout mentioned that Bonnie had been wounded, but doctors and lawmen in Perry had no additional information. Ever solicitous of her family’s reputation, Emma lied to the Iowa reporters, telling them that Bonnie was Clyde’s wife.

  On Thursday, Buck fell into a coma. He never regained consciousness and died on Saturday, July 29, with his mother at his bedside. Buck was thirty. His body was sent back to Texas, and he was buried in West Dallas on the following Monday. About fifty family members and friends attended the funeral. The presiding minister read verses from the Bible and said nothing at all about Buck’s life or crimes. Buck’s ex-wife Margaret brought his eight-year-old son, Ivan Jr., and fainted as the casket was closed. Cumie wept silently throughout the service. Henry sat beside her with his head bowed, not speaking. Schmid and his deputies stood guard around the chapel, hoping Clyde might try to sneak into his brother’s funeral. After the service was concluded and Buck was buried in the Western Heights Cemetery, rumors immediately began to circulate that Clyde had come after all, disguised as a woman in a dress and wig. Marie Barrow told friends later that it certainly was something her brother could have done, but hadn’t. She said she knew because if Clyde had been at the service, he would have found some way to talk to his family.

  Blanche didn’t attend, either. By the time Buck was buried, she was in the Platte County jail awaiting trial. The authorities had only one surviving Barrow Gang member in custody, and they meant to make an example of her. After being captured with Buck in Dexfield Park and going with him to the doctors’ office in Dexter, Blanche was transferred first to jail in Adel, then to a larger jail in Des Moines. Most of the time she was a passive prisoner, but occasionally she became hysterical and screamed for Buck. A Des Moines doctor extracted glass from her eyes, but she still had only limited vision in the right eye and practically none in her left. Someone weighed her—Blanche was down to eighty-one pounds, thirty-three less than when she became a reluctant Barrow Gang member in late March, and ten less than just one week earlier when she’d weighed herself in Platte City.

  On Monday night and Tuesday morning in the Des Moines jail, Blanche was interrogated. She insisted she had nothing to tell. She’d been with the Barrow Gang because she didn’t want to leave her husband. She hadn’t been involved in any robberies and she’d never fired a gun at anyone. The cops were skeptical. “No one,” Blanche wrote later, “would accept that I stayed with my husband simply because I loved him too much to allow him to go any place without me, even when it meant death or imprisonment for me.” They harangued her about the fifth gang member—surely she knew who he was. Blanche said it was Jack Sherman, an alias W. D. Jones sometimes liked to use. Then she said the fellow’s name was Hubert Bleigh, and bulletins went out alerting authorities in surrounding states to be on the lookout for either one. Nobody tracked down Jack Sherman, but two days later Hubert Bleigh was arrested near the Oklahoma town of Seminole. He was a small-time crook; Blanche must have met him at some point when his path crossed the Barrow Gang’s. Bleigh was shipped to Arkansas to be tried for the murder of Alma marshal Henry Humphrey, but it soon became clear he wasn’t the other gunman who’d been there with Buck. The unfortunate Bleigh was then sent back to Oklahoma, where he was arraigned on unrelated robbery charges.

  Blanche thought the Iowa police treated her unkindly during questioning, but then she had to face another, and far more terrifying, interrogator. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Division of Investigation, personally came to Des Moines late Monday or early Tuesday morning to coerce Blanche into telling whatever she knew. Though he was only thirty-eight, Hoover’s relentless ambition had already propelled him to national prominence. Following World War I, he’d risen in the Justice Department ranks by developing systems to gather and disseminate information about suspected domestic radicals. Within two years, Hoover and the U.S. government were keeping secret tabs on more than 450,000 citizens. By 1933, criminals had replaced suspected communist sympathizers as Hoover’s main targets. Public obsession with political radicals had waned. Now Americans were fixated on crime, so Hoover fully intended that his organization and agents would be prominent in bringing the most famous crooks to justice. Nabbing Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker would be a tremendous coup, one that would further establish Hoover’s reputation with the general public and solidify his place in government power circles.

  When Hoover confronted Blanche, she was wearing a patch over her left eye. Blanche claimed decades later that Hoover told her to talk or else he’d gouge out her good eye. No government records giving Hoover’s side of the story appear to exist. Even if he did make the threat, Blanche didn’t have anything more to tell him than she’d already told the other lawmen—she’d been with the Barrow Gang because she wanted to stay with her husband. She didn’t know where Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and their unidentified partner might be. Apparently, Hoover believed her.

  On Tuesday afternoon, July 25, Blanche was handed over to Platte County sheriff Holt Coffey, who took her back to Missouri. Because he’d been slightly wounded in the Red Crown shootout, Blanche expected Coffey to hate her. When she asked if he felt like killing her, Coffey replied that he didn’t work that way. He said he tried to be kind to everyone, and he treated Blanche with courtesy.

  Soon after Blanche arrived in Platte City, Dr. Silas Durham came to the jail to examine her eyes. He extracted more glass and told her he didn’t think the vision in her left eye could be saved. He was correct. Dr. Durham liked Blanche and told his family that she was quiet and resigned, not terrifying or even slightly scary in any way. She liked him, too, and afterward was complimentary about the medical care he provided for her. After being in the shadow of Clyde and Bonnie for months, Blanche quickly became something of a folk hero in her own right to teenaged girls in the area. They thought it was very romantic that she hadn’t abandoned her mortally wounded husband in Dexfield Park.

  On Saturday, July 29, Blanche woke up in her Platte City cell after dreaming that Buck was calling to her. She took it as a sign that he had died, but no one would confirm it to her. It was Sunday afternoon before Blanche was officially notified that she was a widow. Holt Coffey and his wife did their best to comfort her. She remained in the Platte City jail for another six weeks. Then, on September 4, Blanche Caldwell Barrow pleaded guilty to a charge of assault with intent to kill Platte County sheriff Holt Coffey. Highway patrolmen Thomas Whitecotton and Leonard Ellis weren’t on hand to testify that Coffey’s neck wound in the Red Crown shootout was the result of friendly fire. Blanche said later that she’d only agreed to plead guilty to spare herself the agony of a trial—no jury, she said, would ever have believed she was innocent, let alone that she’d never fired a gun during her whole time with the Barrow Gang. Blanche was remanded to the Missouri state prison for ten years and began serving her sentence the same night.

  Bonnie Parker wasn’t the only aspiring poet in the Barrow Gang. Following Blanche’s death in Texas on December 24,
1988, long after she’d been released from prison in Missouri, friends went through her possessions in the trailer where she lived. In one box, stashed among bank receipts and canceled checks, they found a poem titled “Sometime” that Blanche apparently wrote during her months on the run:

  Across the fields of yesterday

  She sometimes comes to me

  A little girl just back from play the girl I used to be

  And yet she smiles so wistfully once she has crept within

  I wonder if she hopes to see the woman I might have been.

  —Blanche Barrow, 1933

  CHAPTER 22

  Struggling to Survive

  Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. fled west from Iowa. They hoped to lie low for a while in Colorado, but when they arrived they read in a local paper that the state police were on the lookout for them. The three remaining members of the Barrow Gang wouldn’t have been difficult for any alert lawmen to spot. Bonnie was crippled, Clyde’s injured left arm dangled, and they were all wrapped in sheets found in the stolen Ford V-8 from Polk City. The clothes they’d worn during the July 24 attack were so bloodstained they had to be discarded. Their other belongings had been abandoned back in Dexfield Park, so there was nothing else but the sheets for them to wear. They cut holes in the middle and stuck their heads through. The most famous outlaws in America looked like children dressed up as ghosts for Halloween.

  Since Colorado apparently wasn’t safe, Clyde decided to throw off potential pursuit by following a zigzag route that took the trio as far north as Minnesota and Illinois before dipping back south through Nebraska and eventually into Mississippi. They got the money they needed through an ongoing series of small-town robberies. Their take was never very much, just enough for food and gas and some clothes. They tried to avoid even medium-sized towns where local police might be lurking. On August 20, Clyde and W.D. broke into an armory in Illinois, and came away with three BARs, a number of handguns, and lots of ammunition. Now they felt they were sufficiently armed again.

  But W.D. told Clyde and Bonnie the same thing he’d told Buck and Blanche back in Dexfield Park. He wanted to go home to his mother. They understood, and Clyde coached W.D. about what to say if the law ever caught him. The smart thing, Clyde suggested, would be for W.D. to insist he’d been forced to participate in the various robberies and shootouts. The cops would probably believe anything that made Clyde Barrow sound evil, and a Kaufman grand jury had accepted the same story from Bonnie just a year earlier. W.D. agreed to stay with Clyde and Bonnie until they were healed enough to completely fend for themselves.

  So it was the first week in September before the weary trio finally straggled back to West Dallas. Clyde and Bonnie hadn’t seen their families for four months. It was not a joyous reunion. After dropping W.D. off on September 7—he immediately left for Houston, where his mother, Tookie, now lived—Clyde made contact with the other Barrows and Parkers and arranged a meeting outside of town. The Barrows and Parkers were shocked at Bonnie’s appearance. Her body was skeletal, and she couldn’t walk at all. Clyde carried her out of their car and placed her on a quilt that was spread on the ground. Then the fugitive couple described their lives on the run since Dexfield Park. Every night had been spent in their car, usually camped out in the country. Motor courts weren’t safe for them anymore. The Red Crown in Platte City had proven that. But they’d learned a new trick—sometimes, late at night, they’d sneak into a town and park in someone’s driveway. Any passing cops would think the car belonged to whoever lived in the house. They’d only been discovered by their unsuspecting hosts once, and managed to get away.

  On most of their previous visits, Clyde and Bonnie had arrived with gifts and cash for their relatives. Now they had to ask for things instead. They wanted pillows so sleeping in the car would be more comfortable, and blankets because the early-fall nights were getting cooler. Bonnie needed bandages, burn salve, and crutches from a pharmacy. They had no money to buy these items for themselves. Roles were reversed—they’d become the poor relations. Clyde’s sister Marie thought that for the first time her brother believed his family’s lives in West Dallas looked good in comparison to his.

  A pervading sense of doom clouded the September 7 gathering. Buck was dead and buried, but his grave had no headstone because Henry and Cumie were certain Clyde would die soon, too. They planned to bury him alongside Buck, and then save money by purchasing one headstone for both. Henry and Cumie were motivated by practicality, not callousness. Headstones were expensive. They told Clyde about it, and he liked the idea. He even had suggestions about the kind of stone to be used, and what he wanted inscribed on it.

  After September 7, Clyde and Bonnie kept close enough to West Dallas to meet with their families frequently. Clyde in particular seemed unconcerned about the local police. The rest of the Barrows thought that Buck’s death made Clyde value his remaining family members even more. He volunteered to drive his mother and sisters on visits to relatives living nearby, and spent several afternoons trying to learn to ride his brother L.C.’s motorcycle. He didn’t have a knack for it, which amused L.C. much more than Clyde. At night, Clyde and Bonnie would usually sleep in deserted farmhouses. Thanks to the Depression and bank foreclosures, there were plenty of them to choose from.

  Besides wanting to be near his family, Clyde had another reason for staying around West Dallas. As much as he loved Bonnie, in her current physical condition she was a liability rather than an asset during robberies. Her damaged leg prevented her from driving a getaway car, and she was too weak to hold service station operators or grocery store clerks at gunpoint while Clyde looted their cash registers. But now between her family and his there was always someone to take care of her back at one of the hideouts. That left Clyde free to recruit new gang members, then go out on the road with them to commit the sort of multiple-gunman holdups that would bring in better money.

  Once again, it wasn’t hard to find willing partners. Far from being damaged, Clyde’s reputation was enhanced by the debacles in Platte City and Dexfield Park. Both times, he and the rest of his gang had been significantly outnumbered. Although Buck had died and Blanche had been captured, what mattered to the public was that Clyde managed to shoot his way clear and save Bonnie, too. If anything, he was a bigger celebrity than ever. Small-time Texas hoodlums Henry Massingale and Dock Potter, both escapees from Texas prisons, eagerly accepted his invitation to become the latest members of the Barrow Gang. Clyde apparently had some earlier dealings with them. Leaving Bonnie behind, Clyde, Massingale, and Potter drove north into Oklahoma with the intention of robbing some businesses around Enid. Clyde was familiar with the area, and it was only a day’s drive from West Dallas. But once again, Clyde’s timing was terrible. He and his new partners arrived just as a breakout from the Oklahoma state prison in McAlester had lawmen all over the area scrambling to recapture a trio of escaped convicts. The three Texas outlaws ended up being chased for hours by Oklahoma cops who were certain they were on the tail of the McAlester escapees. Trying to elude them, Clyde stole four different cars in the same day. When the fourth car got stuck in the mud in northern Oklahoma, Clyde, Massingale, and Potter hiked into a nearby town on foot. At one house, they saw some elderly women playing croquet in the front yard. Massingale ran up to them, waved a .45, and demanded the keys to one of the cars parked along the curb. Instead of giving him the keys, two of the ladies began whacking Massingale with their croquet mallets. Someone called the town police, and the battered crook was arrested. Massingale was eventually convicted of robbery with firearms and sent to prison for twenty years. Clyde and Potter managed to get back safely to West Dallas, but that ended their partnership. The Barrow Gang was back down to Clyde and Bonnie.

  In mid-October, tragedy struck the Parker family. First Jackie, the two-year-old daughter of Bonnie’s sister, Billie Jean, suddenly became ill and died. A few days later, Billie Jean’s four-year-old son, Buddy, got sick and died, too. Their grandmother Emma later wrote that the c
hildren had been stricken with “a stomach disorder,” but the real illness may have been pneumonia or typhoid. These diseases were common among poor children in Dallas. Bonnie was grief-stricken. She had doted on her niece and nephew. After they died, she began drinking heavily again, and this caused her appearance to deteriorate further. Just twenty-three, Bonnie no longer looked cute or even young. Emma intensified her efforts to talk Bonnie into leaving Clyde and surrendering to the authorities. She used Blanche Barrow as an example. Though Blanche had been in the middle of shootouts where policemen had died, Emma lectured her oldest daughter, she was still given only a ten-year prison sentence. Surely Bonnie realized a prison term was better than the miserable life she was living now, with death as its inevitable conclusion. Billie Jean Parker, mourning the loss of her children, sided with Emma. She didn’t want her beloved sister, Bonnie, to die, too. Emma and Billie Jean made their pleas right in front of Clyde and the Barrows, who didn’t blame them for what they were trying to do. But Bonnie was adamant. Yes, she knew she was going to die, but she wanted to die with Clyde. In fact, when they did die, she wanted them to be buried side by side, together for eternity. But Emma and Billie Jean kept trying to change her mind.

  As October stretched into November and Clyde and Bonnie still stayed in the Dallas area, the rest of the Barrows and Parkers wondered why Smoot Schmid and his deputies hadn’t tried to trap the fugitives. It was common knowledge in West Dallas that Clyde and Bonnie were often around. But the slum community’s code of silence was holding fast. For many residents, lawmen were the enemy, and Clyde Barrow was a local boy who’d made good. Try as he might, Schmid hadn’t been able to find a West Dallas informant who’d let him know when and where the next Barrow-Parker family gathering with Clyde and Bonnie was scheduled. Still, both families went to great lengths to conceal their comings and goings. Certain that their phones must be tapped by now—they weren’t, yet—they used the code phrase “red beans” when they called to inform one another about a request from Clyde for a meeting. They also tried not to say Clyde’s and Bonnie’s names over the phone. Jesse James remained one of Clyde’s heroes, and James had sometimes used the pseudonym of Mr. Howard. So, as an inside joke, the Barrows and Parkers referred to Clyde and Bonnie as “Mr. and Mrs. Howard” when they talked on the telephone.