But the fuss in Gibsland paled in comparison to the chaos that erupted when the motley parade finally reached Arcadia, where the usual population hovered around three thousand. It was later estimated that 16,000 people milled about the town hoping for a glimpse of Clyde’s and Bonnie’s bodies. Grasping hands snatched at the corpses as staff from the funeral parlor tried to remove the bodies from the car and roll them inside on gurneys. Many were shocked by how small the famous criminals had been. One onlooker, disappointed by Clyde’s scrawny frame, announced, “He was nothing but a little bitty fart!” When members of the swelling mob wouldn’t stop trying to climb inside the Ford, Jordan had the vehicle moved to a fenced impound lot.
The two bodies were taken into the funeral parlor, which occupied a back room in Conger’s Furniture Store. Coroner Wade convened a six-member panel to monitor a hasty inquest. His investigation that morning was minimal. Wade examined the bodies, listed distinguishing characteristics including the heart tattoos on the inside of Bonnie’s right thigh, catalogued their many potentially fatal wounds, and concluded by asking Bob Alcorn to formally identify the deceased. Then he stepped aside so an embalmer could begin his work.
Outside, hysteria evolved into festival-like glee. Radio stations were broadcasting the news, and newspaper reporters began arriving into town. According to one article describing the scene, “it was impossible to purchase a cold drink in the town, and storekeepers and stand operators were calling frantically upon neighboring towns to send supplies to meet the unprecedented demand…beer which sells for fifteen cents a bottle during normal times was sold for twenty-five cents. Cigarettes went up to twenty cents a package and it was almost impossible to get a sandwich, two slices of bread and a small piece of ham, at any price.”
The journalists wanted a statement from Hamer, who explained that he’d “hated to bust a cap on a woman.” Hamer didn’t mention the last series of shots he fired into Bonnie to make certain that she was dead. He did expand on what he’d told Lee Simmons, saying “both Clyde and Bonnie reached for their guns and had them halfway up before we started shooting.”
Rumors were flying that the posse had been tipped off by a local informant, and some reporters guessed it must have been Henry Methvin or a member of his family. Hamer refused to comment, saying that there were some things the public had no right to know. The attempted subterfuge failed. Headlines in the next day’s Dallas Morning News proclaimed, “Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker Trapped and Killed When Underworld Associates Give Tips to Officers.”
Henderson Jordan offered an alternative version of events to a reporter from the Associated Press. According to Jordan, he’d personally broken the Barrow Gang case after working on it for about six weeks. Jordan said he “got in touch” with Hamer and the Dallas County lawmen because he wanted someone involved “who knew Barrow and Parker personally in order not to make a mistake in shooting them if we found them.”
Earlier, news photographers had snapped pictures of Clyde’s and Bonnie’s still clothed remains. Coroner Wade removed the clothing from the corpses to conduct his abbreviated inquest, and somehow another cameraman got in the room and took photos of the bodies as they lay naked on embalming tables. Some newspapers and magazines subsequently printed his pictures, treating readers to the sight of dead Bonnie’s breasts. Hamer didn’t care about the pictures, but he liked the idea of giving the crowd outside a good look at how Clyde and Bonnie had paid the ultimate price for their crimes. At his direction, once the bodies were decently covered again people were allowed to line up, come in, and view them. When the line failed to maintain a respectful distance from the corpses, one of the funeral parlor staff sprayed the gawkers with embalming fluid.
Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid arrived in Arcadia by early afternoon. He pulled Alcorn and Hinton aside and told his two deputies that he knew of at least $26,000 in reward money to be divided among the six participants in the ambush. Schmid anticipated a flood of positive publicity for his previously maligned department. He must have been sorely disappointed the following day, when a Dallas Morning News editorial lauding the ambush mentioned only Bienville Parish sheriff Henderson Jordan by name.
Clyde’s father, Henry, and brother Jack reached Arcadia soon after Schmid. Bonnie’s brother, Buster, didn’t arrive until almost 10 P.M. He’d gotten lost on the way. Both families learned the bad news earlier in the morning when they were called by journalists asking for comments. Emma Parker fainted. Cumie Barrow told an Associated Press reporter that “I prayed only last night that I might see [Clyde] alive just once more.” Henry was sorrowful but resigned as he waited in Arcadia to claim Clyde’s body. He assured the media there that the Barrow family felt no animosity toward the lawmen who killed Clyde—they were simply doing their jobs. Ted Hinton noticed that the Barrows and Parkers had contacted separate Dallas funeral homes to arrange transportation of the bodies back to Texas. He assumed that meant Clyde and Bonnie would not be buried together, and he was right. Emma Parker told family and friends that Clyde might have had Bonnie in life, but she wouldn’t let him have her in death, too. With Bonnie gone, Emma felt no further obligation to pretend that she had liked Clyde.
After presenting their relatives with boxes containing the clothes Clyde and Bonnie had been wearing during the ambush, funeral parlor staff released the bodies for transport by hearse back to Texas. Late that night, Clyde’s remains arrived at Sparkman-Holtz-Brand Funeral Home in Dallas. Bonnie’s corpse was delivered to McKamy-Campbell Funeral Home. The surviving Barrows and Parkers tried to rest as best they could, and woke up Thursday morning to find that the public was every bit as interested in Clyde’s and Bonnie’s funerals as it had been with their crimes.
The Dallas Morning News anticipated the furor that would envelop both services. In its editorial praising authorities for “tracking down the criminals, cornering and finishing them,” the newspaper added, “the community owes a debt to itself and to posterity to see to it, by injunction if need be, that no show is made of the interment of the brutal pair who have met a fate that they deserved.” But what the community wanted was one final show from Clyde and Bonnie. On Thursday the bodies were available for visitation at their respective funeral homes, a mistake both the Barrow and Parker families immediately regretted. Ten thousand people overran Sparkman-Holtz-Brand Funeral Home to get a glimpse of Clyde’s corpse. Clyde’s brother L.C. tried to block the most boisterous pseudomourners from approaching the coffin. Some of them were drunk. One man offered Henry Barrow $10,000 for his son’s body. Finally, Dallas police were summoned to move the crowd outside. Things went a little better for the Parkers at the McKamy-Campbell Funeral Home. Emma Parker guessed later that twenty thousand people filed past her daughter’s open casket, but for the most part they remained orderly. Emma had dressed Bonnie in a pretty blue negligee. A white veil covered her face in an attempt to disguise the mutilation caused by the posse’s bullets.
Clyde was buried on Friday afternoon at Dallas’s Western Heights Cemetery. He shared a grave with his brother Buck. During the interment, flowers were dropped from a plane flying overhead. The minister delivering the eulogy pleased Cumie by mentioning how Clyde had prayed regularly for his entire life. The crowd in the cemetery was so tightly packed that pallbearers had trouble carrying Clyde’s casket to the graveside. Former Barrow Gang member Joe Palmer risked his life by coming into Dallas to attend the service. He mingled with the crowd and wasn’t noticed by the police observing the proceedings.
Bonnie’s funeral was on Saturday. Her sister, Billie Jean, still in custody for allegedly shooting the highway patrolmen in Grapevine on April 1, was allowed to attend in chains. Though Emma Parker boycotted Clyde’s services on Friday, all the surviving Barrows attended Bonnie’s funeral on Saturday. In an odd, uncharacteristically conciliatory gesture, Emma allowed Clyde’s brother L.C. to be one of Bonnie’s pallbearers. Bonnie was laid to rest in Fish Trap Cemetery beside the graves of her niece and nephew who died the previous
fall. Police provided more crowd control than they had for Clyde’s service the previous day. A large floral arrangement was collectively sent and paid for by Dallas newspaper vendors. In two days they’d sold almost a half-million copies of extra editions featuring stories about the ambush and funerals.
As Bonnie had predicted in her poem, she and Clyde did go down together. But she could never have anticipated the extent of the mythology that would continue to grow about them, or the misery that their families would still have to endure. Clyde’s and Bonnie’s lives were over, but not their legacy.
AFTERWARD
“People only live happily ever after in fairy tales.”
—BLANCHE BARROW
CHAPTER 41
Consequences
Nineteen thirty-four was a fatal year for prominent criminals in America. Clyde’s and Bonnie’s deaths in the Gibsland ambush were just the first in a series. During May and June of 1934, Congress passed several national crime bills designed to give J. Edgar Hoover and his Division of Investigation agents more authority to pursue criminals. Bank robbery became a federal rather than a state crime—thieves could no longer elude pursuit by traveling from one state to another. Tough new federal gun laws decreed harsher penalties for using machine guns while committing criminal acts. With expanded authority to pursue the criminals Hoover had begun calling “America’s most wanted”—who all robbed banks and used machine guns—his agents dogged the interstate steps of the most famous lawbreakers and began picking them off. John Dillinger was shot and killed on July 22, two months after Clyde and Bonnie died. Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down by federal agents on October 22, and Baby Face Nelson suffered the same fate on November 27. Ma Barker and her son Fred were killed by agents in a gun battle on January 16, 1935. The most prominent outlaw celebrities had been eliminated.
Texas also acted to curtail crime. Ma Ferguson lost the fall 1934 gubernatorial race to James V. Allred, who pledged to make the state safer for its citizens. In 1935 the Texas legislature established a new headquarters division in Austin for state law enforcement agencies. Its new Bureau of Identification and Records finally provided all Texas lawmen access to fingerprints, mug shots, and other key data as well as staff to carry out ballistics tests. For the first time, there was even a statewide police radio network. As with the tougher federal laws, Clyde and Bonnie’s crimes weren’t the sole impetus for radically upgrading law enforcement in Texas. But they were certainly key contributing factors.
Clyde and Bonnie also continued to impact the lives of their families and others who’d been involved in some way with them. Just two weeks after their deaths, there was positive news: Bonnie’s younger sister, Billie Jean, and Raymond Hamilton’s brother Floyd were cleared in the Easter Sunday murder of highway patrolmen Wheeler and Murphy. Ballistics tests proved that the bullets that killed the officers were fired by BARs found in Clyde’s car following the Gibsland ambush. The news wasn’t as happy for the lawmen who’d gunned down Clyde and Bonnie on May 23. About the same time Billie Jean and Floyd were set free, the six Gibsland posse members received their share of the pooled reward money. In Arcadia on the afternoon of the ambush, Smoot Schmid had promised his deputy Ted Hinton that they’d divide $26,000 between them, but most of the state, county, and business organizations that had pledged sums reneged on their promises. Frank Hamer, Manny Gault, Henderson Jordan, Prentiss Oakley, Bob Alcorn, and Hinton each got checks for $200.23. For Hamer, at least, it didn’t matter as much. He had all of Clyde and Bonnie’s guns, which he and his family gradually sold off to memorabilia collectors. When Cumie Barrow and Emma Parker learned that Hamer possessed their late children’s arsenal, they wrote and asked him to return the guns. The Barrows and Parkers were still impoverished and badly needed the money they would have realized from selling the guns themselves. Hamer refused.
Bienville Parish sheriff Henderson Jordan, who the Barrow family subsequently believed had Clyde’s cash-crammed suitcase, also had a plan for additional ambush-related income. The bullet-pocked Ford V-8 sedan Clyde had driven into the ambush was still locked in Arcadia’s city impound lot. Despite all the bullet damage to its sides, windows, windshield, and trunk, the car’s powerful engine still ran smoothly. To Jordan’s way of thinking, the car was ambush booty that belonged to the six lawmen, too. He declared that “five other men and myself risked our lives to make that car what it is today. What we did to it is what makes it valuable. We deserve any profit to be made from it.”
But Ruth Warren of Topeka, Kansas, disagreed. Ever since post-ambush news reports identified the now famous “Death Car” as the vehicle stolen from her home on April 29, Warren had been asking Jordan to return it to her. Jordan’s lawyer notified Warren that she could have her car back for $15,000. Warren hired a lawyer of her own, and a federal judge in Shreveport ruled that Jordan had to return the car to her. She drove it home to Topeka, and in August rented the Ford for $150 a week to Charles W. Stanley, who referred to himself as “the Crime Doctor.” Stanley loaded the car onto a flatbed truck and toured the country with it, using the chance to see the sievelike vehicle as an enticement for people to listen to his anticrime lectures. Admission was free, but Stanley suggested audience members each donate a dime toward his expenses.
Losing the Death Car was a setback for Henderson Jordan, but his disappointment was nothing compared to the consternation of Henry Methvin. Henry and his parents had expected Hamer to deliver the Texas pardon just as soon as Clyde and Bonnie were dead, but months passed without further word from the former Texas Ranger. Finally on August 14, Governor Ferguson announced the pardon, which noted that “[Henry Methvin] gave to the authorities in Louisiana valuable information that led to the apprehension and capture of one Clyde Barrow and one Bonnie Parker.” The Methvins assumed their son’s problems with the law were over so long as he avoided future crimes. Henderson Jordan suggested to Henry that he stay inside Bienville Parish limits, and Henry went to work at a local lumber mill. Then on September 12 an Oklahoma court issued a warrant for Henry’s arrest for the murder of Commerce constable Cal Campbell. Texas might have pardoned Henry for his crimes in that state, but Oklahoma never promised to pardon him for anything. Henry was arrested in Shreveport, extradicted to Oklahoma, and promptly tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. His mother, Ava, and family friend John Joyner went to Oklahoma to testify during Henry’s appeal, and in their testimony they explained in detail how the family had cooperated with Hamer and Jordan in arranging the Gibsland ambush. Hamer supported their statements, and Henry’s sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. He was paroled after serving eight years.
Back in Dallas, the Barrows and Parkers were trying to get on with their lives during the summer of 1934 when they were approached by writer Jan Fortune. She explained she wanted to work with the families and write the true story of Clyde’s and Bonnie’s lives. Emma Parker agreed to cooperate, and so did Clyde’s sister Nell. Fortune interviewed both women at length, and in the fall published Fugitives. The completed book outraged both families. Clyde’s sister Marie called Fugitives “romanticized, sentimentalized claptrap,” and Nell Barrow protested that she “never told the writer any of that stuff.” But the families never sued the author—probably because by the time Fugitives was published they had much more serious legal concerns.
New, tougher federal laws called for punishment not only of bank robbers but also of those who in any way aided or abetted them. By fall 1934, rumors began to swirl in Dallas that the government planned to prosecute everyone who “harbored” Clyde and Bonnie during their two-year crime spree. It turned out to be true: beginning late in the year, members of the Barrow and Parker families as well as friends and former partners of Clyde and Bonnie began to be arrested. They were held in the Dallas County jail to await trial in the spring. Cumie Barrow was locked up along with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Marie. Emma and Billie Jean Parker were also incarcerated. For reasons never made clear, the government was sele
ctive regarding who was prosecuted. Clyde’s father, Henry, brother Jack, and sisters Artie and Nell and Bonnie’s brother, Buster, weren’t charged. But Marie’s husband, Joe Bill Francis, was, and so were Raymond Hamilton’s mother and stepfather. In all, there were twenty defendants, including Henry Methvin, W. D. Jones, and Blanche Barrow, who were transferred to the Dallas County jail from their respective prisons.
The trial began on February 22, 1935. The men and women were tried separately. Cumie Barrow had to be carried into the courtroom on a chair. Clyde’s brother L.C. was disgusted to find that he was shackled to Henry Methvin during court proceedings. The Barrows had long since decided Henry was the squealer who betrayed Clyde and Bonnie. When Cumie testified, she made no apologies about seeing Clyde whenever she could—he was her son, she said, and she loved him no matter what crimes he might have committed.
The trial lasted four days, and in the end all twenty defendants either pleaded or were found guilty. The maximum sentence for harboring was two years in prison, and sentences ranged from the full two years for Raymond Hamilton’s brother Floyd to one hour in police custody assessed to teenager Marie. Cumie Barrow and Emma Parker each were sentenced to a month in jail. Prosecutor Clyde Eastus told the press that “the United States Attorney’s office and the Department of Justice Division of Investigation are very pleased with the conviction of these persons. We feel that the result will have a wholesome effect on others who are harboring or concealing persons wanted by the government.”
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