But Smoot Schmid remained obsessed with capturing the couple. He confided to deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton that once he had Clyde and Bonnie in custody, he planned to “walk them down Main Street of Dallas to show the world what [I’ve] done.” As the lawman who’d caught Clyde Barrow, Schmid predicted, he could be reelected sheriff of Dallas County for as long as he liked. There might even be a chance to run for higher office—governor was what Schmid had in mind. In November 1933, the opportunity he’d been waiting for finally arrived.
Cumie Barrow turned fifty-nine on Tuesday, November 21, and Clyde convened a family gathering to celebrate off Highway 15 in Sowers, a tiny community a dozen miles northwest of Dallas. The Barrows and Parkers were together almost all day, but Clyde was upset because he hadn’t brought his mother a birthday present. He told Cumie that he wanted to meet the next night in the same place—he’d have a gift for her then. His plan was highly unusual. Clyde never liked to hold family gatherings in the same place twice in a row. But the meeting place in Sowers was isolated, and there had never been any trouble when the Barrows and Parkers gathered there before. As the party on November 21 broke up, everyone agreed they’d reconvene in Sowers after dark the next day.
Dusk came early on November 22. About 6 P.M. a party of five left the Barrow family service station in West Dallas. Their car was driven by Joe Bill Francis, a teenager who was going steady with fifteen-year-old Marie Barrow. Joe Bill and Marie would marry in another six months. Cumie Barrow sat in the front seat with Joe Bill. Marie was in the back along with Emma and Billie Jean Parker. They drove out to Sowers and parked at the usual spot just off Highway 15. They didn’t realize that another car was parked just to the south, concealed behind a fence. Smoot Schmid had finally found his informant. Years later, the Barrow family decided that either Joe Bill Francis or Billie Jean Parker sold Clyde out to the law. Joe Bill, they thought, would have done it for a reward. His marriage to Marie didn’t last, and she came away from it with a bad opinion of him. If Billie Jean was the informant, the Barrows believed, she betrayed Clyde in return for a promise from Schmid that Bonnie either wouldn’t be prosecuted or else would receive a very light sentence. The Dallas County cops never revealed the identity of the informant, but he or she must have come to them right after the meeting in Sowers on November 21, when Clyde asked for another get-together in the same place on the next evening.
So while Cumie, Marie, Emma, Billie Jean, and Joe Bill Francis waited by the roadside in Sowers for Clyde and Bonnie to arrive, Smoot Schmid was waiting there, too, along with Dallas County deputies Ted Hinton, Bob Alcorn, and Ed Caster. The lawmen were well armed. Alcorn had a BAR, Schmid and Hinton had Thompson submachine guns, and Caster carried a .351 repeating rifle. Schmid didn’t expect much if any shooting. After Clyde and Bonnie showed up, the posse would emerge from hiding and arrest them. It was going to be simple, and afterward the newspapers would have to write glowing stories about the Dallas County sheriff for a change. Alcorn and Hinton argued that Clyde Barrow would never surrender no matter what circumstances he might find himself in, but Schmid ignored them.
At 6:45 P.M., Clyde and Bonnie approached the meeting place from the north. They were driving a black Ford V-8 sedan. Newspapers and true crime magazines constantly lauded Clyde’s supposed “sixth sense,” and now it may have come into play. According to his family, Clyde told them later that as he drove up to Joe Bill Francis’s car he suddenly felt something was wrong. Perhaps he was just feeling nervous about meeting two nights in a row in the same place. For whatever reason, Clyde drove right past the car where his family was waiting, gaining speed, and the Dallas County deputies leaped to their feet. Schmid yelled “Halt!”—Hinton described it later as “the most futile gesture of the week”—and the lawmen started shooting, their bullets flying at Clyde and Bonnie in the V-8 and also past them directly at the car where Cumie, Marie, Emma, Billie Jean, and Joe Bill Francis were sitting. Everyone in it but Marie dropped to the floor. She sat up to watch what was happening. Cumie, curled under the dashboard, prayed out loud for her son to get away safely. Schmid’s gun jammed, but Alcorn, Hinton, and Caster kept shooting. The windshield and the windows of Clyde’s V-8 were smashed. The lawmen heard the glass breaking. Somebody in the V-8 fired back, probably Clyde, and Hinton’s arm was grazed. Pocked with bullet holes, bumping on one side because of a tire flattened by a bullet, the V-8 veered off on a side road and disappeared into the night. By the time the Dallas County cops regrouped and got back to their own car, it was much too late for them to pursue Clyde and Bonnie. They had no portable radio equipment, so they had to drive into Sowers and find a telephone to alert area law officials that the Barrow Gang was on the run in a black, bullet-riddled Ford V-8. In the confusion, Joe Bill Francis drove Cumie, Marie, Emma, and Billie Jean back to West Dallas. None of them had been hurt, but they were all badly shaken.
Clyde and Bonnie were wounded. A slug from Bob Alcorn’s BAR had penetrated the driver’s side door of the V-8, then passed through their legs. They were bleeding badly, and when Clyde briefly stopped to get out and see how severely they were hurt, they had trouble standing. It was obvious they needed another car—the black V-8 couldn’t go fast or far on its shredded tire—and medical attention. Driving west of down-town Dallas, Clyde spotted a 1931 four-cylinder Ford being driven by Thomas James, a lawyer from Fort Worth. That wasn’t a powerful enough car to usually suit Clyde, but now he steered the V-8 in front of James, forcing the attorney to pull to the side of the road. When James and his passenger didn’t move fast enough, Clyde fired a warning blast from a shotgun. After he and Bonnie transferred guns and some other belongings to the four-cylinder Ford they drove away, leaving their victims standing on the roadside. From there, Clyde and Bonnie headed north into Oklahoma. They contacted a doctor who had an underground reputation for treating wounds suffered by on-the-run criminals. Then they drove into eastern Oklahoma, seeking out another famous criminal.
Just as Clyde Barrow was always associated with West Dallas, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was known to have his base in Sallisaw, near Oklahoma’s Cookson Hills. Pretty Boy wasn’t often there—he was eventually accused of ten murders and dozens of bank robberies all over the Midwest—but his wife and family usually were. Barrow family members and crime historians have disagreed for years where and when Clyde, Bonnie, and Pretty Boy might have met. J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation was convinced the three infamous crooks at some point planned to work together. One thing seems certain: though Clyde and Bonnie admired Pretty Boy, he absolutely disdained them. His son told historian Rick Mattix years later that Pretty Boy thought the Barrow Gang was “too careless with the lives of civilians.”
No matter how and when they may have become acquainted, after the Sowers ambush Clyde and Bonnie went to Sallisaw hoping that Pretty Boy would hide them for a while. He wasn’t in town, but his sister-in-law Bessie Floyd greeted the fugitives. She didn’t let them stay, but felt sorry enough for them—Bonnie in particular, who she thought “didn’t look good”—to provide medical supplies, sheets, and canned food. Apparently the Floyd family kept a cache of such materials handy. When Pretty Boy came home and Bessie told him about the visitors and their plea for help, he told her never to assist Clyde and Bonnie again. Pretty Boy added that “if they don’t like it, they can look me up.” His attitude was typical of the era’s other best-known outlaw toward the two. Master criminal John Dillinger dismissed Clyde and Bonnie as “a couple of kids stealing grocery money.”
While Clyde and Bonnie hid out in Oklahoma nursing their wounds, the Dallas County sheriff was suffering, too. The Dallas newspapers competed to ridicule Smoot Schmid after Clyde’s latest escape from his clutches. Paperboys hawked extra editions about the failed Sowers ambush by piping, “Sheriff escapes from Clyde Barrow!” Reporters wanted to know why Schmid had laid his trap with only himself and three deputies. The clear suggestion was that the inept lawman had wanted all the credit for their capture
for himself. Readers were reminded that this wasn’t the first time Schmid had failed to catch Clyde. One story began, “Evading, as has become a habit of his recently, a trap laid for him by Sheriff Smoot Schmid, Clyde Barrow…fled in a machine gun bullet-riddled car.” Schmid defensively announced Clyde and Bonnie had been seriously, maybe mortally, wounded. He and his men had found bloodstains all over the front seat cushions of the abandoned Ford V-8, along with “bed covers, pillows, medicines, lipstick, rouge, mirror, safety razor, knives and forks, a quantity of canned food, a sackful of pennies, and eleven different license plates.” There were also copies of all the latest true crime magazines—Clyde and Bonnie still liked to read about themselves. When that didn’t impress the reporters, Schmid defensively pointed out that he and his officers had at least done better than some of their counterparts, referring to the April shootout in Joplin. “[Sowers] wasn’t a total failure,” he argued. “At least we didn’t get any of my men killed like they did up in Missouri.” When the Dallas media failed to seem impressed, Schmid announced a bombshell. Maybe he hadn’t caught Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, but he had their partner in custody. W. D. Jones was a prisoner in the Dallas County jail, and he was singing like the proverbial canary.
Ted Hinton wrote later that the Dallas County cops had known that W.D. was with Clyde and Bonnie all along, but that couldn’t be true. As late as in the aftermath of the shootout in Dexfield Park, when Iowa authorities asked Schmid for assistance in identifying the third male member of the Barrow Gang, he wasn’t able to help them. It was the kind of vital information even an ambitious man like Schmid wouldn’t have concealed. Withholding evidence would have been a criminal act on his part. Sometime between the first week in September 1933, when Clyde and Bonnie returned W.D. to West Dallas, and the night of November 16 when he was arrested in Houston, somebody tipped the law about his identity. W.D., who’d been supporting himself by picking cotton and selling vegetables, always thought it was “a boy in Houston…[who] knowed me and turned me in to the law.”
W.D. was sent to the Dallas County jail. Schmid chose to not immediately announce his arrest and arrival, probably thinking that to do so might scare Clyde and Bonnie away from the area. As soon as Hinton and Bob Alcorn began questioning W.D., he fell back on the alibi suggested by Clyde. He’d been kidnapped and forced to participate in robberies and shootings, he swore in a statement recorded by sheriff’s department stenographers. Every time someone had been robbed or shot, W.D. explained, he was either being held hostage by the rest of the Barrow Gang or else unconscious. At night, they either chained him to motor court cabin bedposts or forced him at gunpoint to sleep in cars. Once Clyde learned that he was cooperating with the law, W.D. whined, he’d come and try to kill him. He pleaded with the Dallas County cops not to turn him loose—he was only safe from Clyde in the fortresslike county jail.
When Schmid triumphantly presented W.D. to the Dallas media, their resulting stories were all the thin-skinned county sheriff could have hoped for. Headlines in the Dallas Morning News announced that the “Enforced Companion of Clyde and Bonnie Relates Weird Stories; Joined Them Voluntarily for a Time, Then Was Held Captive for Fear He’d Squeal.” The accompanying story described the seventeen-year-old as “so frightened that he could not smile when asked to by a photographer.” W.D. was mostly frightened by the possibility of being extradited to Arkansas for the murder of Alma marshal Henry Humphrey. Texas laws were more lenient than Arkansas’s regarding criminal acts by children under eighteen. Part of W.D.’s deal with Schmid was that he’d be tried in Texas for the murder of Malcolm Davis instead. (Later, W.D. also cleared Clyde’s former partner Frank Hardy for the murder of Doyle Johnson in Temple on Christmas Day, 1932.) On December 19, W.D. was indicted by a grand jury, and he eventually received a relatively lenient fifteen-year prison sentence.
Clyde wasn’t bothered by W.D.’s imaginative testimony. He thought the kid had done the smart thing. The one Clyde immediately wanted to hunt down and kill after the Sowers ambush was Smoot Schmid. He believed the Dallas County sheriff had ignored an unspoken understanding not to place Clyde’s family in danger. It was one thing for Schmid to try to gun down Clyde and Bonnie, who were armed and could shoot back. It was quite another to send bullets whizzing by the heads of Clyde’s mother and sister. When he and Bonnie returned to the Dallas area a week after the incident in Sowers, Clyde parked outside the Dallas County jail for several hours hoping Schmid or deputy Bob Alcorn, whom he also blamed, would come out so he could shoot them. Eventually his sister Nell talked him out of murdering Schmid. She convinced Clyde that the murder might cause the Dallas County police to retaliate against other members of the Barrow family.
The close call in Sowers didn’t discourage Clyde and Bonnie from staying around Dallas and frequently gathering together with their loved ones. Clyde did change part of his pattern for calling meetings—now, he confided where and when only to Cumie, and she would bring everyone else to the place. The bond between mother and son remained strong. Beginning on November 29, 1933, Cumie even recorded the dates of Clyde’s visits, marking them on a wall in the Barrow family shack on Eagle Ford Road and later listing them in her unpublished memoir: “December 8th, 10th, 14th, 20th and 29th; January 4th, two times that day, 7th, 10th, 13th, 15th and 18th; February 13th, 18th, 22nd; March 3rd, 19th (12th?), 24th, 27th.” Then she stopped keeping track. When Clyde and Bonnie came around on December 29, they brought baskets full of fruit, nuts, and candy as holiday gifts for their families. Bonnie reported that they’d had a nice Christmas dinner in a small-town Texas café. Apparently, their most recent robberies had been somewhat successful. Besides being able to buy their relatives Christmas presents, they also had enough money to get Clyde a new suit.
During the January 13 visit, Clyde’s brother L.C. had a message for him from Raymond Hamilton’s older brother Floyd. He wanted to see Clyde immediately about a plan to break Raymond out of Eastham Prison Farm.
CHAPTER 23
The Eastham Breakout
As soon as he arrived at Eastham Prison Farm on August 8, 1933, Raymond Hamilton began bragging that he wouldn’t be there long. Clyde Barrow was going to break him out. It seemed to Ralph Fults, who’d been partners with him and Clyde during March 1932, that twenty-year-old Raymond loved attracting attention to himself with the boast. Prison officials didn’t take it seriously. Clyde Barrow might scare the rest of the world, but Eastham was so isolated and well guarded that nobody would ever attempt an attack there.
Raymond spent the rest of 1933 picking cotton and chopping wood in the fields of Eastham’s Camp 1. He renewed his friendship with Fults, and got to know some other cons. One was Joe Palmer, a thirty-one-year-old bank robber. Palmer suffered from various respiratory diseases, and the Camp 1 guards often abused him when he had trouble keeping up with the rest of his work detail. Palmer hated them for it, especially Major Crowson, a “high rider” or mounted overseer, and Wade McNabb, a building tender. Joe Palmer was a man who believed in revenge.
Another Huntsville acquaintance of Raymond’s was James Mullen, who was released on January 10, 1934, after completing a sentence for burglary. Two days later he showed up on the West Dallas doorstep of Raymond’s brother Floyd. Mullen claimed that Raymond had promised him $1,000 to contact Floyd and help arrange a breakout. Mullen wanted Floyd to get him together with Clyde Barrow right away. Floyd contacted Clyde’s brother L.C., and a meeting with Clyde was arranged for the night of Saturday, January 13, in the countryside outside Dallas.
Raymond’s plan as presented to Clyde by Mullen was relatively simple. Eastham Camp 1 work crews were currently cutting wood and brush near a back road on the edge of the prison farm property. Raymond wanted two loaded pistols left under a bridge there. Fred Yost, an old acquaintance of Raymond’s who worked as an unarmed trusty at Eastham, had agreed to get the guns and bring them to him. Soon after they had the pistols, he, Joe Palmer, and Ralph Fults would go out in the early morning with the convict wo
rk crews, get the drop on their guards, and run to the road. That was where Clyde came in. Raymond may not have liked Clyde personally, but he knew that Clyde had considerable success driving his way out of tight situations. What Raymond wanted was for Clyde to park just past the bridge where the guns had been hidden, and drive him and the other escapees away before the guards could overtake them.
Clyde hated the plan. He told Mullen and Floyd that it was foolish to attempt an escape by car when there was only one escape road available. It would be too easy for the Eastham guards to follow them. He also didn’t trust Raymond, who he thought might brag about the escape plan and alert the guards in advance, or Mullen, who he believed was a liar and probably a drug addict. Bonnie, whom Clyde brought with him to the meeting, was more enthusiastic. She thought that if Raymond rejoined them they would be able to rob banks again. Floyd Hamilton argued that Clyde was obligated to help. Part of Raymond’s current 263-year sentence was based on the murder of John Bucher in Hillsboro, a killing by Clyde’s gang when Raymond wasn’t even in Texas. Decades later, Floyd still resented how long it took to talk Clyde into agreeing. When Clyde finally did consent, he said he wouldn’t risk planting the guns under the bridge. Eastham Farm had too many guards and dogs. Mullen and Floyd would have to do it themselves. Clyde’s sole role would be as driver of the getaway car.
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