Someone, probably the Louisiana officers, had brought along sandwiches and a thermos of ice water, so they ate and talked quietly. The six-man posse was clearly split into buddy teams of two—Hinton and Alcorn, the Dallas County deputies; Jordan and Oakley from Bienville Parish; and former Rangers Gault and Hamer. No pair particularly liked or trusted the other four, but these animosities didn’t surface until afterward. As they waited for the sun to rise, everyone was still cooperative, working out the final details of the ambush. Only Jordan and Oakley had the authority to arrest, let alone shoot down, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in Louisiana. Hamer’s powers granted by Texas governor Ma Ferguson meant nothing across state lines. To satisfy legalities, it’s likely that Jordan temporarily deputized Hamer, Gault, Alcorn, and Hinton while they waited on the hilltop. The six men also agreed that it would be Alcorn’s responsibility to confirm that Clyde and Bonnie were in the car when the V-8 sedan was finally spotted. He and Hinton were still the only posse members who had seen them in person. Alcorn was probably assigned the extra duty because Hamer liked and trusted him more than he did Hinton.
The predawn hours passed slowly, and the sun brought no relief. The humid morning heat soon caused everyone to become drenched in sweat. Mosquitoes swarmed even more furiously around the posse, but they weren’t the most aggravating pests as far as the lawmen were concerned. Sometime around sunrise, they were joined on the hill by Ivy Methvin. According to subsequent Oklahoma court testimony by his wife, Ava, Ivy “left pretty early” on Wednesday morning to participate in the ambush. She wasn’t certain of the time but knew it was after Ivy had breakfast, which country folk in Bienville Parish usually took just before dawn. Ivy arrived as ordered, but made it clear that he wasn’t happy about being there. As soon as there was light enough to see, the posse helped Ivy position his truck on the southbound side of the road, partially on the shoulder with the nose of the truck’s hood sticking out onto the road itself. Then they jacked up the front end of the vehicle and pulled off its right front tire to suggest a blowout caused by the flinty rocks speckling the dirt road. It would be impossible for anyone coming south on narrow, three-rut Highway 154 to drive straight past. At the very least, southbound drivers would have to slow and maneuver their cars around Methvin’s truck. Methvin was told that when Clyde and Bonnie appeared around nine, he was to hurry down the hill so they would see him standing beside his presumably disabled vehicle. That really set Ivy off. Now that his son’s deal was in place and Henry was well away from Clyde and Bonnie and the ambush site, the father was worried about his own hide. Clyde and Bonnie were killers, he kept repeating, monsters with no concern for human life. If they did show up, if shooting did start, it was the lawmen and poor Ivy Methvin who’d be killed. Finally Jordan snarled that if Ivy didn’t shut up, Clyde and Bonnie wouldn’t get the chance to kill him because Jordan would.
With the morning came another complication. Working people in Bienville Parish were early risers, and cars began moving past the ambush site—not many, because the spot was sufficiently far from town, but the farmers in their old clunkers and the loggers in their long-bedded vehicles conformed to standard 1934 road etiquette and stopped beside Methvin’s jacked-up truck to offer help or a ride. Each time, Methvin had to stumble down the hill and explain that things were fine, he was about to get the wheel back on the truck, so thanks and go ahead on your way. If Clyde drove up while another motorist was already stopped by the truck, the posse members believed, he might very well keep on going, and even if Clyde did pause, how could they unleash a fusillade with innocent bystanders right beside their prey? They apparently had less concern about Ivy’s ability to dodge their bullets when the time came.
An hour passed, then two. At nine o’clock there was no sign of Clyde and Bonnie, but the posse stayed in place. Hamer had no doubt he was coming—he knew from months of careful study that Clyde always kept his word about appointments. Finally at 9:15 they heard a car approaching from the north several seconds before it even came into sight. The throaty purr of the engine indicated the automobile was more powerful than most other vehicles on Bienville Parish roads. Then the gray Ford V-8 sedan roared into view a quarter-mile to the lawmen’s right. Clyde as usual had a heavy foot on the gas pedal, and in contrast to the lumbering trucks that had passed earlier, the Ford was moving fast, possibly at 60 miles per hour or more on this long, straight stretch. Hinton and Alcorn squinted at the vehicle.
“This is him,” Hinton whispered to Alcorn. “This is it, it’s Clyde.” Alcorn agreed, and passed the word to the rest of the posse. Ivy Methvin hustled down the hill. The Ford approached where he stood beside the jacked-up truck and slowed. The posse on the hill could clearly see Clyde behind the wheel and Bonnie in the front seat beside him. The lawmen raised their guns. The waiting was over.
CHAPTER 39
The Ambush
A little before nine on Wednesday morning, Clyde and Bonnie drove into Gibsland and parked in front of Ma Canfield’s café. Clyde probably went inside by himself to order their breakfast sandwiches to go. They were expected at the Methvins’ place, which was about a twenty-minute drive from Gibsland, and carrying Bonnie in would have taken extra time. The locals eating breakfast at Ma Canfield’s watched Clyde warily. By now, they were used to having him and Bonnie around, but propinquity never entirely erased trepidation. Afterward, the people in the café would disagree about whether the sandwiches Clyde ordered were fried bologna or bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Ivy Methvin, who got an uncomfortably close look on the Sailes–Jamestown road a few minutes later, told his family afterward that Clyde and Bonnie’s takeout breakfast consisted of hamburgers. Whatever he ordered, Clyde took the food out to the car and the couple drove away, heading south out of town. He saved his sandwich for later, but Bonnie began eating hers. After a few bites she wrapped the rest of the sandwich in a napkin and held it on her lap along with a road map. Bonnie was wearing a red dress. Clyde had on a suit and blue Western dress shirt. He also wore a hat. Bonnie had a tam, but she’d tossed it into the back seat. They kept several guns handy, but these were also on the back seat because there was no room for them in front.
It was a warm, muggy morning and Clyde rolled down the two driver’s side windows in the V-8 sedan so fresh air could circulate in the car. About a mile and a half out of town the highway took a ninety-degree turn to the west, then gradually curved south again. By the time Clyde reached the long, downhill straightaway two miles from the Methvin place, he had the Ford barreling down the rutted dirt road at 60 or 65 miles an hour. They weren’t going to make their scheduled 9 A.M rendezvous with Henry exactly on time, but they’d only be fifteen or twenty minutes late.
Then looking ahead down the road Clyde must have seen a jacked-up truck and probably a familiar figure standing beside it. There was also a massive logging truck coming in the other direction, heading north toward Mount Lebanon and Gibsland. There was no way the logging truck, Ivy Methvin’s truck, and the V-8 sedan were all going to fit on the same section of the narrow road. Then the driver of the logging truck slowed and pulled over to the side, giving Clyde right-of-way. Clyde didn’t take it. He slowed, then put the Ford into first gear and came to a complete stop beside Ivy Methvin and his apparently disabled truck. The V-8’s engine was still idling. Though he didn’t think it would do any good, this was the moment when Frank Hamer had agreed to call out for Clyde and Bonnie to surrender. The grizzled former Ranger probably prepared to stand up and shout.
On the hilltop, fifty feet to Hamer’s right, twenty-nine-year-old Bienville Parish deputy Prentiss Oakley was amazed to find himself no more than thirty feet away from two of the most famous criminals in America. Oakley had come to the ambush site prepared to kill. He had the right weapon for it, a Remington Model 8 with a special five-shot clip that he’d borrowed from an Arcadia dentist. The owner considered the Remington to be so lethal that he kept it locked in the vault of Arcadia’s bank when he wasn’t using it. He apparently didn’t
want to risk having the rifle fall into the wrong hands.
But now it was in Prentiss Oakley’s hands, and the young deputy couldn’t control himself. Before Hamer could stand and offer Clyde and Bonnie a chance to surrender peacefully, Oakley jumped to his feet and aimed the Remington down the hill at Clyde. Later, trying to give the impression that they began firing out of self-defense, the posse members claimed that Clyde sensed Oakley’s movement on his left and reached for either a shotgun or a BAR. If Clyde did, he had barely begun to move when Oakley squeezed the Remington’s trigger and fired a burst at about a forty-five-degree angle. Several of the bullets deflected off the post between the Ford’s windshield and the driver’s door, but one flew straight and true through the open driver’s side window and hit Clyde in the temple just in front of his left ear, plowing through his head and exiting out the right side of his skull. Clyde died instantly. He had been driving as usual in his stocking feet, and now his left foot slipped off the clutch and the Ford began rolling forward slowly and at an angle, heading for the shallow ditch on the other side of the road.
Because of the thickness of the brush on the hill and their distance from each other, none of the other five posse members could see Oakley. But they’d heard the shots, and now they saw the Ford moving ahead. There was a very brief interval, no more than two or three seconds, and then Manny Gault, Henderson Jordan, Ted Hinton, and Bob Alcorn began blazing away.
In those few seconds Bonnie screamed, a high shrill wail that haunted the men about to kill her for the rest of their lives. It had been one thing for Bonnie to tell her family and to believe herself that she and Clyde were doomed to violent deaths. Even after so many close calls, death had always been an abstraction, something in the future, and suddenly it was happening. As the Ford rolled forward toward the ditch Bonnie had just enough time to realize that Clyde was dead and she was about to die too and then she did. There is no way to be certain whose bullet killed Bonnie. She was riddled by the barrage laid down by the lawmen on the hilltop. Any number of her wounds would have been fatal. Hinton wrote later that he and his partners fired “about 150 shots.” Many deflected off the Ford, or were trapped in between its double door panels. But some punched through the metal, and others flew unimpeded through the open driver’s side windows. As the Ford passed their vantage points on the hill, Oakley, Gault, Jordan, Hinton, and Alcorn kept firing, and the slugs from their rifles smashed into the sedan’s trunk and through its rear window. Some of the bullets that penetrated the car’s interior passed through Clyde and then hit Bonnie.
Throughout his 102-day pursuit, Frank Hamer had often declared that he was reluctant to kill a woman. But once the shooting started, Hamer’s lethal instincts kicked in. He’d always told his Ranger troops that the best way to enforce the law was a .45 slug in the gut, and that philosophy remained intact. As the Ford gradually rolled to a stop in the ditch beside the road, Hamer hustled down the hill, brandishing his powerful Colt Monitor Machine Rifle. He was taking no chances. First, he fired a burst into Bonnie through the rear passenger window. Then, when the car had completely stopped, the six-foot, three-inch Hamer walked forward, leaned his towering frame over the front seat where Bonnie was slumped, and fired a final series of shots down through the window and windshield directly into her.
A mile away in the pine forest, Olen Walter Jackson was cutting and hauling trees for the railroad. Jackson and the rest of his crew had been ordered to cut the trees by hand and not use the easier but noisy alternative of placing dynamite at the roots and blasting the trees down. Hearing explosions off to the west, Jackson decided that somebody was dynamiting trees after all. The noise was surely too extended, too concussive, to be gunshots.
In fact, just sixteen seconds elapsed between the first shots from Prentiss Oakley and the last ones fired by Frank Hamer. Though no one could have survived the ambush, the six lawmen were still cautious as they surrounded the well-perforated Ford. But Clyde and Bonnie were clearly dead. Clyde’s shattered head had fallen through the spokes of the steering wheel. Bonnie slumped forward in the passenger seat. The napkin-wrapped sandwich from Ma Canfield’s was still clutched in her hand. Blood and bits of flesh were splattered all around the interior of the car.
In the end, it had been surprisingly quick and easy. Clyde and Bonnie were killed without firing even a single shot in reply. Ted Hinton told people that “when all was said and done, they weren’t nothing but a bunch of wet rags.” On Tuesday night, Frank Hamer had promised his son that the chickens would come home to roost at about nine the next morning. He was only off by fifteen minutes.
CHAPTER 40
“Well, We Got Them”
As the posse surrounded the bullet-riddled Ford, Ivy Methvin emerged from wherever he’d sheltered during the ambush, probably under his truck. Now he wanted someone to help him get the right front wheel back on his vehicle so he could go home, but the lawmen paid no attention to him. The driver of the logging truck and two passengers who’d been riding with him tiptoed nervously from the woods. When the shooting had started, they’d jumped out and scurried into the trees. Now they milled about, too—between Clyde’s Ford and Ivy Methvin’s still disabled truck, narrow Highway 154 was effectively blocked.
Dallas County deputy Ted Hinton produced his 16-millimeter movie camera and filmed the other officers examining the Ford. The first moments in Hinton’s film seemed to show fog partially enveloping the ambush site. In fact, the wispy clouds were lingering gunsmoke. When the lawmen opened the passenger side front door, Bonnie’s limp body almost fell out. They saw the half-eaten sandwich in her hand, and the now blood-smeared road map still on her lap. Henderson Jordan reached into the back seat and pulled off a blanket concealing a lumpy heap of guns and suitcases. The posse members talked back and forth but had trouble hearing each other. The gunfire temporarily deafened them.
Frank Hamer conducted a quick inventory of the Ford’s contents—Texas prison general manager Lee Simmons had promised Hamer that he could have anything Clyde and Bonnie had in their possession at the time of their killing or capture. In their car on the morning of May 23 the lawmen found three BARs, two sawed-off shotguns, almost a dozen handguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, fifteen sets of stolen license plates, several suitcases full of clothes, a makeup case, a box of fishing tackle, several true crime magazines, road maps, and Clyde’s saxophone. There was also a book, The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns. Hamer took the guns and the tackle box. The other posse members contented themselves with lesser souvenirs. Dallas County deputy Bob Alcorn grabbed Clyde’s saxophone. Later his conscience bothered him and he returned the instrument to the Barrow family. The suitcase full of cash disappeared. The Barrows always believed that it was taken by Henderson Jordan, who soon after the ambush purchased an auction barn and land in Arcadia.
Once the booty was distributed and locked in the cars behind the hill, it was time for the lawmen to contact their bosses. Alcorn and Manny Gault stayed behind to guard the car and bodies while Hamer, Hinton, Jordan, and Oakley drove back into Gibsland. They took turns using the telephone at the service station there. Jordan called the Bienville Parish coroner in Arcadia, asking him to come to the ambush site and bring a tow truck for the Ford. Hinton called Smoot Schmid, and the Dallas County sheriff gleefully notified the local press before racing to Louisiana to share the inevitable spotlight. Hamer telephoned Lee Simmons and said simply, “Well, we got them.” Then, already trying to spin the story into self-defense rather than slaughter, Hamer added, “They died with guns in their hands.”
Jordan, Hinton, and Hamer didn’t realize their conversations were overheard by some locals lounging around the service station. Word spread quickly in Gibsland that Bonnie and Clyde were dead, and within minutes a procession of cars, trucks, and people on foot began heading south on Highway 154. As they returned to the ambush site, the four lawmen were annoyed by the throng tagging along after them, but when they arrived they were taken even more aback
to discover that a crowd had already formed there. The cacophony of gunfire attracted farmers and logging crews eager to see what was going on. Observing the carnage wasn’t enough for many of them—the side of the road opposite the hilltop teemed with souvenir hunters trying frantically to dig bullets out of tree trunks with pocketknives. Others wanted even more significant memorabilia and rushed to the Ford itself. Alcorn and Gault did their best to keep everyone away, but some people managed to reach inside the car where Clyde and Bonnie’s bodies still slumped in the front seat. One man tried to cut off Clyde’s ear. Another attempted to sever his trigger finger. The lawmen prevented those mutilations, but somebody with scissors managed to snip off locks of Bonnie’s hair and bits of her gory dress before being pulled away.
The wrecker arrived and the Ford was chained to it. Bienville Parish coroner J. L. Wade made a cursory examination of the bodies inside the vehicle and offered the preliminary, obvious finding that Clyde and Bonnie died of gunshot wounds. The next legally required step was for their remains to be taken to Arcadia so Wade could conduct a more thorough examination. With the two corpses still in its front seat, the Ford was towed back north. Jordan and Oakley’s car led the way, followed by Hamer and Gault. Then came the wrecker, Hinton and Alcorn in their car, and a line of vehicles driven by locals. Hinton guessed there were at least two hundred cars following the wrecker by the time it reached Gibsland.
And then, still nine miles away from Arcadia, the wrecker broke down in the worst possible place. The macabre procession passed Gibsland’s public school just as many students were sent outside for recess. After the wrecker hauling the battered Ford stalled directly in front of the building, screeching children swarmed around the car. Someone, probably Coroner Wade, had covered Clyde and Bonnie with a sheet, but one of the students reached in and pulled the sheet off them. Hundreds of pairs of juvenile eyes took in the ghastly sight of the two mutilated corpses. Polly Palmer, then twelve years old, said more than sixty years later that she remembered how Bonnie’s lip was almost severed from the rest of her mouth. Teachers tried to shoo the kids away until another wrecker arrived, and finally the ever-lengthening line of cars continued on to the parish seat.
Jeff Guinn Page 39
