Around 1:30 or 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, January 14, Mullen and Floyd managed to stash two .45 automatics in the designated spot under the bridge. They wrapped the guns in a rubber tire inner tube. Then later in the day Floyd visited Raymond and told him the guns were planted and Clyde had agreed to drive the getaway car. Raymond said the escape would take place between 6:30 and 7:00 on Tuesday morning, the typical time that the Eastham farm squads of prisoners began their day’s work. Clyde should have the getaway car just out of sight down the road.
On Monday, Fred Yost retrieved the loaded .45s and brought them to Joe Palmer. Palmer pretended to suffer an asthma attack. The guards grudgingly allowed him to spend the remainder of the day in his bunk, and Palmer kept the guns hidden under the covers. There was a last-minute change in the escape plan. Ralph Fults was moved to another part of the Huntsville prison system. He asked Raymond to take Hilton Bybee, who’d previously shared a Wichita Falls cell with Fults, in his place.
Clyde was so concerned that Mullen might betray him that he insisted the fellow come with him and Bonnie when they drove south toward Eastham farm late on Monday night. No one knows why Bonnie came along. She wasn’t involved in the breakout plot, but perhaps Clyde didn’t feel he could safely leave her back in West Dallas, particularly if he was on the run for a while after the breakout. Clyde’s current ride was another black Ford V-8 coupé, a smallish vehicle that could barely seat five adults. Fitting in six—Clyde, Bonnie, Mullen, Raymond, Palmer, and Bybee (instead of Fults; Clyde didn’t know about the switch until afterward)—was going to be tough, but Clyde was less interested in comfort than security. They parked near a stream not far from the spot where Raymond planned to make the break.
Just after dawn, the camp’s Plow Squads One and Two were led out to begin cutting and stacking wood and brush. There was heavy ground fog that morning, and it was hard to see. Squad One was closest to the road, and Raymond Hamilton found himself in Squad Two. He hurriedly switched places with another prisoner, hoping the guards wouldn’t notice, but they did. As work commenced Olin Bozeman, standing watch over Squad One, called over high rider Major Crowson, who was toting a shotgun. “Major” was the thirty-three-year-old Crowson’s given name, not a title. Bozeman told Crowson that Raymond Hamilton had switched squads. He might be up to something. But before Crowson and Bozeman could react, Joe Palmer walked up to them with a .45 in his hand and shot Crowson in the abdomen at point-blank range. Crowson tried to return fire, but his shotgun blast went high before he crumpled off his horse. Then Raymond Hamilton fired at Bozeman, hitting him in the hip. Bozeman dropped, too, and Raymond and Palmer ran for the road. Hilton Bybee fled with them, and so did two other prisoners—Henry Methvin, a young Louisiana thug serving a ten-year sentence for attempted murder and car theft, and J. B. French, a career criminal from Oklahoma. As they sprinted into the fog Joe Palmer yelled, “Give us something else,” which Clyde, who’d heard the shots fired by Palmer and Raymond, interpreted as a request for covering fire. While Bonnie honked the V-8’s horn to guide the escapees to the car, Clyde fired a burst from his BAR into the air. It was enough to send the remaining guards scrambling away.
Now there was an unexpected problem. Clyde had anticipated only three new passengers, which would mean excruciatingly tight quarters inside the V-8 coupé. Though French kept on running—he’d be recaptured a few days later—Raymond, Bybee, Palmer, and Methvin all wanted to be driven out. It seemed impossible to fit seven adults into the car, and they had to get moving before the panicked guards summoned help. Mullen said only Raymond and Palmer could come, but Clyde told him to shut up. He’d always imagined engineering an Eastham prison break, and now he wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. All seven crammed in—at least two of the fugitives squeezed into the trunk—and Clyde raced away. By the time he stopped for gas in Hillsboro, news of the escape had already spread. The attendant at the service station said he just heard on the radio that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had sprung Raymond Hamilton from Eastham Prison Farm. The fog had surely kept the work squad guards from clearly seeing and recognizing Clyde. He was undoubtedly credited with masterminding the breakout because Raymond had bragged so often that his old partner would be coming soon to free him.
Clyde called the Barrow service station in West Dallas later on Tuesday afternoon. He instructed L.C. and Floyd Hamilton to bring some civilian clothes to the nearby small town of Rhome, where he and the others would meet them. Raymond, Palmer, Bybee, and Methvin were still in their prison overalls. The clothing delivery was made, and Mullen left with L.C. and Floyd. The four escapees from Eastham remained with Clyde and Bonnie—there was a new Barrow Gang.
Back in Huntsville, Major Crowson and Olin Bozeman were taken to the city hospital. Bozeman’s wound wasn’t life-threatening, but Crowson’s was mortal. His intestine was perforated by the bullet from Joe Palmer’s .45. Lee Simmons, the prison general manager, was fuming. Like everyone else, he assumed that the entire breakout was planned and carried out solely by Clyde Barrow. It was one thing for Simmons’s former prisoner to drive around the country robbing small-town stores and shooting country cops. It was another for Clyde to have the audacity to raid what was supposedly Texas’s most secure prison farm. Simmons, like Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid, was extremely sensitive to criticism in the media, and after the January 16 breakout it wasn’t long in coming. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News speculated that if prison officials couldn’t “offer capable resistance” against “the world of gangland,” judges and juries should begin meting out more death sentences to reduce the number of desperate cons being held so ineptly in Huntsville. National publications chimed in. Time magazine, which had recently added a new page devoted entirely to coverage of crime, noted that “convicts left behind spotted the handiwork of Clyde Barrow, notorious outlaw-at-large,” adding that he was joined by “his woman, gun-toting, cigar-smoking Bonnie Parker.”
Major Crowson lingered until January 27, long enough for Simmons to call in a notary to take the fatally wounded man’s final statement. Crowson swore he “never did shoot at Joe Palmer who shot me,” and that the armed convicts “didn’t give me a dog’s chance.” Before he expired, he begged Simmons to send Joe Palmer to the electric chair, and Simmons swore he would. At Crowson’s funeral, the dead man’s father reminded Simmons of his promise.
But Joe Palmer undoubtedly mattered less to Lee Simmons than Clyde Barrow. It was Clyde who had humiliated Simmons, Clyde who apparently devised the escape plot that made the prison system manager look like a fool in the eyes of the public. Only if he was integral in Clyde’s capture or death would Simmons’s own reputation be restored.
What was needed, the Texas prison general manager decided, was organized, ongoing pursuit. Even when several different law enforcement agencies had worked cooperatively in Platte City and Dexfield Park, they still made only one-time attempts to gun down the Barrow Gang. When Clyde got away, they didn’t follow. The way to nail Clyde Barrow was to create a posse that tracked Clyde instead of waiting for him to come to them. Because Clyde ranged so widely, these pursuers would need the active support of authorities in several states besides Texas. That meant whoever led the Barrow Gang pursuit should command respect from lawmen everywhere.
Protracted pursuit wouldn’t be cheap. Simmons had to convince Texas governor Ma Ferguson that running down the Barrow Gang was worth considerable expense. He believed he could. Simmons thought the tough part would be talking Governor Ferguson into letting him hire the man he wanted to head the posse, because she and former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer loathed each other.
But it had to be Frank Hamer. To catch Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Lee Simmons wanted the only lawman in Texas who was as famous—and as deadly—as America’s most notorious criminal couple. In Austin, he persuaded Governor Ferguson to let him offer Hamer the newly minted post of “Special Escape Investigator for the Texas Prison System.” But that was only half the battle. Now Simmons had to convince Hamer t
o take the job.
CHAPTER 24
Hamer
Thirty-one years before Texas prison general manager Lee Simmons asked him to hunt down Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Frank Hamer almost became an outlaw himself.
In 1903, the nineteen-year-old Hamer was working as a wrangler on a ranch outside the West Texas town of San Angelo. Hamer was a huge kid, six feet three inches and over two hundred pounds in an era when most grown men weren’t even six feet tall. He was tough, too, having already survived a blood feud with a former friend. Three years earlier, Hamer and one of his brothers sharecropped a plot of land with Dan McSwain. McSwain, who knew Hamer was a dead shot with a rifle, shotgun, or pistol, offered the teenager $150 to ambush another rancher. Hamer refused, and promised to tell the intended victim about McSwain’s plot. McSwain responded by stalking Hamer and leveling him with a shotgun blast. Badly wounded in the head and back, Hamer returned fire with a pistol and drove McSwain away. After he healed, Hamer tracked McSwain down and shot him dead. Mercy was not in his nature.
Neither was bank robbery, but in 1903 in San Angelo he was sorely tempted. An older wrangler convinced Hamer and several other younger ranch hands that if they robbed the town bank, they could use the money to buy and operate their own ranch in Mexico. But as they walked toward the bank to commit the crime, the ranch foreman rode up and told them it was time to get back to work. They did, and when he reflected on the close call with a criminal life decades later, Hamer told family and friends that it was the adventure of bank robbery that had appealed to him, not the money.
Though Hamer didn’t join the ranks of lawbreakers himself in 1903, three years later he became their nemesis when he enlisted in the Texas Rangers. For the next three decades, he had all the adventure he wanted. Founded in 1835 as a small, elite force reporting directly to the state governor, the Rangers’ reputation was controversial. Depending on the era and the enemy, they variously fought Indians, Mexicans, rustlers, bank robbers, and bootleggers. Their methods were routinely violent. Hamer, rising quickly to a captaincy, told his troops that “we’re here to enforce the law, and the best way is a .45 slug in the gut.” He meant every word. By the end of his Ranger career he was credited with killing fifty-three men and suffering seventeen wounds himself.
Everybody in Texas talked about the Rangers, and Hamer was the one talked about most. He established his reputation by restoring order in a series of lawless frontier towns—Mexia and Gander Slu and Borger. He was credited with accomplishing most of his great feats single-handedly. An early legend had him arriving alone in an unnamed town to quell a burgeoning race riot. A black man was accused of raping a white woman, and a mob had formed around the jail where the accused rapist was being held. Hamer arrived in town and walked directly toward the prospective lynchers, who turned and screamed at him to leave or be hanged, too. Hamer wore heavy Western boots with pointed toes. He warned everyone to clear the way, then began viciously kicking the shins of all those standing between him and the jail. They moved, and by the time Hamer reached the jail the mob was dispersing, many limping rather than walking. He had absolute confidence in his ability to control any situation.
Even celebrities were starstruck when encountering Hamer. When the Texas Ranger captain visited Hollywood in 1918, cowboy movie star Tom Mix was so impressed that he asked Hamer to quit the Rangers and become an actor in Western films. Hamer declined, but he did become a close friend of the actor, sometimes advising him how to play certain shoot-’em-up roles.
Hamer understood his reputation was just as intimidating to criminals as his favorite pistol—known in the press as “Old Lucky”—and did what he could to embellish it. He would rarely grant interviews, which encouraged journalists to add their own imaginative details. Hamer was taciturn in the extreme. Lee Simmons once joked that Hamer “was going to speak a long piece one day and the shock’ll put him to bed.” But when Hamer did talk to writers or friends, he wasn’t shy about claiming near-superpowers, once telling historian Walter Prescott Webb that his eyesight was so superior he could actually see bullets in flight, and that he could hear far-off sounds as much as thirty seconds before anyone else.
His fame provided Hamer with job security. The legislature mandated the number of Rangers employed by the state, often reducing their ranks from three or four hundred to less than fifty if there seemed to be no immediate crises. The governor of Texas had the power to hire and fire individual Rangers. Several times, Hamer resigned and took other employment—city marshal of Navasota, special agent for the U.S. Prohibition Service—but he always returned to the Rangers. Sometimes he left for the opportunity to make money, but other times he resigned if he disagreed politically or personally with a governor. Whenever that happened, Hamer simply waited out that individual’s two-year term and returned to Ranger duty when a governor more to his liking was elected. (Texas voters routinely voted out incumbents during Hamer’s career in law enforcement.) Hamer could always rejoin whenever he wanted—no governor was going to spurn the services of the most famous Ranger of them all.
But for the first time that wasn’t a given when Lee Simmons approached him in February 1934 to lead the hunt for Clyde and Bonnie. Hamer was a civilian again. He despised the politics of Ma Ferguson, who had been elected governor of Texas in late 1932, and had made the mistake of openly supporting her opponent in the campaign. This time, Frank Hamer really was in danger of being fired, and he left the Rangers before Ferguson took office and had the authority to terminate him. (As soon as she was sworn in, Ferguson immediately fired every Ranger and replaced them with political allies.) Ferguson had served as governor for an earlier two-year term, and Hamer guessed she probably wouldn’t be in office beyond 1934. So he resigned his commission on February 1, 1933, placing himself on “inactive status” rather than retiring outright so he’d keep his future Ranger options open if and when Ferguson was ousted by Texas voters. Meanwhile, when his hopes to be named U.S. marshal for the Western District of Texas didn’t work out—the U.S. senator making the appointment gave it to a longtime crony instead—Hamer stayed in Austin, working for an oil company as a “special investigator” (essentially, breaking strikes and identifying industrial spies), a job that paid a whopping monthly salary of $500, just over three times the monthly $150 that Hamer had been earning as a captain in the Rangers.
When Lee Simmons met with Hamer on Saturday, February 10, 1934, the former Ranger captain was a year into his self-imposed, well-compensated exile. Though he was aware of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Hamer wasn’t immediately interested in leading a posse to track them down. For one thing, he didn’t believe Governor Ferguson and her husband, another former Texas governor who’d been impeached for corruption, would really support him unconditionally. Simmons swore they would; Ferguson, he promised, would even grant Hamer the authority to negotiate deals, including the right to offer pardons for crimes committed in Texas by criminals who would betray Clyde and Bonnie to the law. Then Hamer balked at the salary involved—Simmons admitted the “Special Escape Investigator for the Texas Prison System” would be paid only $180 a month. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, Hamer was concerned about providing for his wife and children after his death. Simmons had a solution for that concern, too. Besides any reward money he could collect, Hamer would be authorized to take whatever he wanted from among the Barrow Gang’s personal possessions when he caught them. Even in 1934, collectors were glad to pay exorbitant amounts for authentic criminal memorabilia.
Hamer said that when he did corner Clyde and Bonnie, he was certain they wouldn’t allow themselves to be taken alive. Simmons assured him that wouldn’t be a problem: “I want you to put [them] on the spot and shoot everyone in sight.”
That was fine with Hamer, but he had a final concern: catching up to the Barrow Gang might take a long time. He was always methodical rather than reckless. What if, after a few weeks or months, the governor and Simmons decided to call the operation off? Hamer wasn’t willing to
waste his time unless he had their complete commitment. Simmons promised that he would back Hamer to the limit “no matter how long it takes.”
The most famous lawman in Texas replied, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll take the job.”
THE HUNT
“I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.”
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
“No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s right and keeps on a-comin’.”
—CAPTAIN BILL MCDONALD, EXPLAINING THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE TEXAS RANGERS
CHAPTER 25
The New Barrow Gang
Shortly after 1 P.M. on Tuesday, January 23, 1934, two men entered the First National Bank of Rembrandt in northwest Iowa. One asked cashier Lloyd Haraldson, the only employee on duty, to change what was later described in newspaper accounts as “a large bill,” probably $10 or $20. When Haraldson opened his cash drawer, the other stranger pulled out a gun and ordered him and customer J. F. McGrew to put up their hands. The thieves coolly rifled the drawer, took about $3,800, and walked out the bank’s back door to an alley, where they climbed into a tan Ford V-8 and drove off. Witnesses reported seeing four men in the car. McGrew and Haraldson told county lawmen and local reporters that they were impressed with the professionalism of the crooks, who remained calm and polite throughout. The Barrow Gang had finally pulled off a quick, efficient bank robbery with a substantial take.
The credit belonged less to Clyde than to his cohorts. Raymond Hamilton and Hilton Bybee went into the bank and conducted the actual robbery. Clyde was left behind the wheel of the getaway car, with Henry Methvin beside him. A fifth gang member was along—Joe Palmer spent the whole time curled in a fetal position and covered with blankets on the floor of the Ford’s back seat. His always delicate health had broken down again, and he’d been too sick to participate. Bonnie apparently had been left nearby, and Clyde angered Raymond during the post-job divvy-up when he insisted that the loot be divided six ways, with Bonnie and Palmer receiving full shares. Raymond had an urgent need for cash—he owed James Mullen $1,000 for helping him escape from Eastham Prison Farm, and Mullen was the type who’d cause trouble if he didn’t get paid. If Clyde had divided the money four ways rather than six, Raymond would have had almost enough to settle the debt.
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