In late February, Nell Barrow had a suggestion. She’d met a man who ran a construction crew in Framingham, Massachusetts. He said he’d hire her brother if Clyde moved there. Clyde was reluctant to go. Bonnie hadn’t remained faithful the last time he was away from West Dallas. But he needed steady income to get start-up money for his auto parts business. Emma Parker claimed she told Clyde it would be fine with her if, once he’d gotten himself established up in Framingham, Bonnie moved there, too. If she did tell him that, she didn’t mean it. Bonnie sister, Billie Jean, swore that her mother was unstinting in her appeals for Bonnie to drop Clyde the minute he left town.
Clyde went, and he hated Framingham. At first, he meant to stick it out until he’d raised enough money to come home and open his shop. Right after he arrived in Massachusetts, he sent Cumie a letter claiming “I like it up here and I guess I will go to work Monday…I am lonesome all ready.” He added that Nell’s friend Jim “is sure a good fellow…. Well Mother I dont know any thing mutch right now but will write more when I here from you so answer real soon and let me know how ever thing is in Dallas. Tell every one hello for me and send my mail to FRAMINGHAM, MASS. General Delivery. Send it to Jack Stuwart. Jack Stuwart that is my name here.”
Clyde probably adopted an alias because he was afraid Dallas police would warn their Massachusetts counterparts about a newly arrived ex-con. There was really no reason for him to worry. The Dallas cops would just have been glad that he was somebody else’s problem.
But he wasn’t gone from Texas for long. Nell’s friend Jim, whose last name went unrecorded, wrote her that Clyde seemed restless and wasn’t able to settle down to work. About two weeks after he’d left, Clyde was back at Eagle Ford Road. He told an angry Nell that he’d nearly died from loneliness in Massachusetts.
More out of habit than hope, Clyde resumed job hunting in Dallas. Bonnie was thrilled to have him back, but the rest of the Barrow family anticipated disaster. To them, Clyde’s aborted employment in New England had been what Marie later described as “a last resort sort of action.” As soon as Clyde found work, the Dallas police began rousting him for suspicion again, and the hired/fired cycle repeated itself.
Further temptation for Clyde to give up on going straight arrived in the person of his Eastham pal Ralph Fults. Fults had been released from the prison farm before Clyde on August 26, 1931. He’d gone home to the northeast Texas town of McKinney to wait for Clyde’s release. Then, Fults figured, the duo would organize the dramatic Eastham prison break they’d talked about while swinging axes on the farm woodpile. He knew Cumie Barrow was working hard to secure a parole for Clyde, and with prison overcrowding it would be just a matter of time before he, too, was set free.
Fults was more pragmatic than Clyde about post-prison employment. He didn’t look for a job while waiting for his friend to get out. Instead, Fults supported himself by gambling. It was a lot more fun than slaving away in some sweatshop. Though Fults himself managed to avoid being arrested, he couldn’t resist aiding in a January 1932 breakout from the McKinney jail. An eighteen-year-old named Raymond Hamilton was awaiting arraignment there on several charges of auto theft. Raymond, from West Dallas, claimed he was an old friend of Clyde’s. That was an exaggeration. The two might have known each other casually. But it was enough for Fults to smuggle in some hacksaw blades he concealed in the spines of several magazines. Hamilton used the blades to cut his way out of his cell on January 27, 1932. He ended up back in West Dallas, grateful to Fults and hoping to hear from him again.
Fults eventually saw a small article in the newspaper listing Clyde Barrow as one of several prisoners recently paroled by the governor. Around the middle of March, he hopped a train to Dallas. This trip came soon after Clyde had returned to Texas from Massachusetts. After arriving at the main Dallas station, Fults stole a car and drove out to the Barrow service station. When he introduced himself to Henry, he was told that Clyde was at work and would be home soon. That surprised Fults, who hadn’t thought Clyde would attempt to make an honest living.
It was a cold day. Henry and Cumie invited their visitor to wait inside, where L.C., Marie, and Buck’s wife, Blanche, were huddled around a wood-burning stove. Fults thought Blanche was exceptionally attractive. In a memoir published sixty-four years later he still remembered and praised her high cheekbones and dark eyes. Blanche said Clyde had told his family all about Fults. While they chatted, Fults took in the rest of the shack. It was tiny and cramped. Almost every inch of limited floor space was taken up with pallets.
When Clyde got home, he announced that he’d just been fired again. A man named McCrary, his latest boss, let him go after the cops showed up to take Clyde in for questioning. Enough was enough: Clyde informed his parents and Fults that he was never going to work again. Fults knew what that meant—Clyde had decided to make crime his occupation. Previously, car theft and small-business safe crackings had been intended to supplement his honestly earned income. Now he’d devote his full attention to lawbreaking. One of his first acts, Fults expected, would be to attempt the long-discussed prison break at Eastham farm.
A few days later, Bonnie told her mother, Emma, that she’d been offered a wonderful job selling cosmetics in Houston, 240 miles south of Dallas. Sometime very soon she’d be moving there. Emma was delighted, less for the employment opportunity than for the fact that her daughter would get away from the malign influence of Clyde Barrow. But Bonnie was lying. Clyde and Fults had formed a gang with Raymond Hamilton, and at Clyde’s invitation Bonnie planned to leave home and travel with them. Whatever the hardships in her new life might prove to be, Bonnie was betting that they’d still be preferable to toiling at low-paying, menial jobs and dating dull men who courted her in the Parkers’ living room under the watchful eye of her prissy mother.
Clyde was no innocent unwillingly forced back into crime. No one deserved the inhuman conditions he’d had to endure on Eastham Prison Farm, including physical abuse from the guards and rape by Ed Crowder. The Dallas cops were clearly making it impossible for him to go straight in his hometown. But he’d brought the prison sentence and local police harassment on himself—Clyde had stolen a lot of cars before being caught and sent to Eastham. After his release, he was still reasonably healthy and possessed good job skills. If at age twenty-two he’d tried to rebuild his life anywhere else but Dallas, the city where his criminal past had stained his reputation with police beyond repair, Clyde might eventually have parlayed his strong work ethic into a decent, law-abiding existence. Though it wouldn’t have been easy, it was certainly possible. But as he’d proven in Massachusetts, he was unwilling to make that effort. Being a criminal simply suited the strong-willed Clyde better. The world, in his opinion, had treated him unfairly, especially the guards and administrators of Eastham Prison Farm. He was more interested in getting even than in getting ahead.
Bonnie also had other options. She could have turned down Clyde’s offer to join him in a life of full-time lawbreaking. She’d had bad luck, too, marrying a crook and then being abandoned by him. But it was Bonnie’s decision not to divorce Roy Thornton, leaving her unable to marry someone else who would treat her better. Her dreams of finding fame as an actress or a poet hadn’t come true, but she had that in common with thousands of other girls who still didn’t turn to crime. Bonnie wanted adventures in her life like the ones she saw in the movies, and at age twenty-one she was willing to risk arrest to have them. She’d already proven that once, when she helped Clyde break out of jail in Waco.
Clyde and Bonnie both saw lives devoted to crime as offering possibilities that going straight couldn’t. They had no long-term plan beyond Clyde’s initial intention to free as many convicts from Eastham Prison Farm as he could. Otherwise, Clyde wanted control. Bonnie wanted excitement. They weren’t fools. They realized there would be inevitable consequences—as Bonnie later noted in a poem, “the laws” always won in the end. But they’d had enough of hoping their lives would change for the better. In her dia
ry four years earlier, Bonnie had plaintively asked, “Why don’t something happen?” Now, they would make something happen. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were insignificant because of who they were, but they would force the world to acknowledge them because of what they did.
THE BARROW GANG
“A good run is better than a poor stand.”
—BUCK BARROW’S SELF-PROFESSED PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
CHAPTER 8
A Stumbling Start
The first three weeks of Clyde Barrow’s and Bonnie Parker’s new lives as career criminals were notable mostly for bad decisions and worse luck. At times, their misadventures would have constituted slapstick comedy if lives hadn’t been at stake.
After dark on March 25, 1932, the trio of Clyde, Ralph Fults, and Raymond Hamilton set out to commit its first robbery. They didn’t have to go far. The Simms Oil Refinery was just a few blocks down Eagle Ford Road from the Barrow family garage in West Dallas. Clyde picked the fume-spewing target. He swore to his cohorts that a Simms employee had told him the company would have a large amount of payroll cash in its safe on the night of the 25th. It would be simple to sneak there under cover of darkness, cut through the chain-link fence surrounding the refinery, overpower a guard if one happened to be there, crack the safe, stuff their pockets with loot, and roar out of Dallas with their haul. Clyde anticipated a large take, perhaps as much as several thousand dollars.
As Clyde had promised his partners, cutting through the fence was easy. He hadn’t known that four employees were still going to be in the building, but they were quickly subdued and tied up. The refinery safe was located and its door cracked open with a hammer and chisel. But then Clyde’s foolproof plan imploded—the safe was empty.
The would-be thieves bolted. Clyde’s initial attempt to lead his newly formed criminal gang had been an abject failure, and Raymond Hamilton let him know it. Though he was still only eighteen, Hamilton had been supporting himself through petty crime for several years. He’d begun by stealing and reselling bicycles, then graduated to stealing cars. After the Simms fiasco, Hamilton wanted the gang to focus on automobile theft. The individual takes would be much smaller than they might be from robbing banks or businesses, he argued, but at least you didn’t have to wonder whether there was money in a safe.
Fults and Clyde had a different plan. Their immediate goal was conducting the long-planned Eastham Prison Farm break, and for that they’d require a lot more money than they could earn by fencing stolen cars. To successfully pull off the Eastham raid, they knew, the gang would need additional members and a lot more firepower than the cheap weapons they’d used in the Simms break-in. Fults had some specific acquaintances in mind as recruits. He knew several crooks living in and around Denton who he believed would make enthusiastic, competent partners. But there was no sense asking them to join up without enough powerful assault weapons to overwhelm the prison guards.
The gang’s current arsenal consisted of the cheap Saturday Night Special handguns that were readily available anywhere, plus a couple of shotguns. In the 1930s, almost every Texas family had a gun or two—it was considered strange to be weaponless. Small-caliber pistols and shotguns were available on street corners for a few dollars. These, however, were notoriously inaccurate even at close range. More upscale weaponry could be purchased in hardware stores. Every town of any size had one. There were no background checks involved when guns were purchased. Even Thompson submachine guns—“tommy guns”—were on sale for a few hundred dollars each. Those who didn’t have nearby stores selling guns could send away for them by enclosing a check with the mail-order forms routinely found in popular magazines. For the Eastham raid, Clyde and Fults also wanted bulletproof vests and a large supply of ammunition. So Hamilton was overruled; the gang would try to make its Eastham budget in one grand haul. Fults preferred banks to small businesses. Even though Clyde had never tried to rob a bank, after the Simms blunder he was in no position to disagree.
While Bonnie waited at home with her mother, Emma, the trio of Clyde, Fults, and Hamilton staged a series of small stickups in and around Dallas to gather some traveling money. They couldn’t stay in the area long. After the Simms break-in, the West Dallas cops were on the lookout for their old target Clyde Barrow. The decision was made to drive north and find a bank to rob somewhere far away from the local heat. Long-distance travel for business, recreation—and crime—had become much easier. The post–World War I Federal Highway Act added 300,000 miles of hard-topped interstate highways. In 1924, Rand McNally published its first national road map, making it relatively simple to plan out routes, and including many smaller state and farm roads as well as the major thoroughfares. Clyde loved the newfangled maps. Throughout his criminal career, they would be found in virtually every stolen car he abandoned along the way.
Clyde, Fults, and Hamilton drove through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa before finally picking out a bank almost nine hundred miles from Dallas in Okabena, Minnesota. It seemed like a perfect target. The bank was set in the middle of a town square. There were roads leading away in several directions. But at the last minute, Clyde called the robbery attempt off. There was too much snow and ice on the local roads, he told Fults and Hamilton. Their car might skid out of control during the escape. It would be better, he insisted, to turn back south and find another bank to rob in a less frigid region. According to Fults’s memoir, they’d seen one, the First National Bank in Lawrence, Kansas, that might do.
They had driven almost nonstop from Texas to Minnesota, pausing only for meals and gas. All three were exhausted, and when they took turns driving on the four-hundred-mile trip back to Lawrence, each fell asleep at the wheel and let the car veer off the road into adjacent fields.
In Lawrence, Fults claimed in his memoir, they had enough money to check into a local hotel, the Eldridge. The next two days were spent casing the bank and the town. After the Simms fiasco, they wanted to be absolutely certain of success. They learned that the First National Bank’s president usually arrived at 8:45 in the morning, with the rest of the bank staff showing up some ten minutes later. There seemed to be only one guard, but as soon as the bank opened for business there was a steady stream of customers.
On the third day, the bank president arrived at the bank at his usual time. Clyde and Fults, brandishing shotguns, rushed into the building after him while Hamilton waited outside at the wheel of the getaway car. Clyde forced the bank president to open the vault, while Fults guarded two employees who arrived while the robbery was in progress. The Lawrence bank’s vault wasn’t empty. Clyde was given two bags of currency. Then he and Fults locked their prisoners in the vault and ran out to join Hamilton. A few miles out of town they stole another car. It all seemed ridiculously easy. The bank guard hadn’t even arrived for work by the time the gang grabbed the money and fled. If the town cops made any attempt to pursue them, they never got within sight or sound of the thieves.
According to Fults, the trio fled 290 miles to East St. Louis, Illinois, where they paused to count their loot and discovered their take was an astounding $33,000. No old Lawrence newspaper accounts exist to verify or disprove Fults’s claim, but $33,000 would have been enough to recruit and supply an army to assault Eastham Prison Farm. Fults might have been wrong about the location of the robbery as well as grossly exaggerating the take from it. But whatever the amount and whichever bank the gang robbed to get it, the haul was substantial enough to impress Raymond Hamilton. He wanted to hit more banks right away. Clyde and Fults refused. They wanted money to finance their Eastham plan, and now that they had some in hand they intended to buy guns and head back to Texas.
Fults knew of a pawn shopowner in Dupo, Illinois, who fenced high-caliber weaponry. It seemed more logical to make their purchases through him than at a hardware store where the shopkeeper might mention a substantial purchase of guns to the police. Fults and Clyde spent their shares of the Lawrence take on .45-caliber pistols, tommy guns, and bulletproof vests. Raymond Hamilton w
anted nothing further to do with them or their Eastham plans. He took his cut of the money and left for Bay City, Michigan, where his father lived. Clyde and Hamilton had disliked each other from the beginning, and Clyde told Fults he hoped Hamilton “chokes on that wad of money.”
Clyde and Fults drove back to Texas in early April, making a quick stop in West Dallas so Clyde could visit his family and spend a few hours with Bonnie. The cops there were still looking for him. Clyde’s father, Henry, kept his radio on during the day, listening for police bulletins that might indicate his son’s pursuers were nearby. When Clyde sneaked over to see Bonnie, he brought Fults with him. Fults had never met Bonnie before, but they liked each other immediately. Her mother was less friendly. Emma Parker refused to let “the cons” enter her house.
After the brief visit Clyde and Fults drove forty miles north to Denton, where they met with four local crooks—Johnny Russell, Jack Hammett, Ralph Allsup (called “Fuzz” because of his burr haircut), and Ted Rogers, who eerily resembled Raymond Hamilton. The quartet was enthusiastic about the proposed Eastham raid, probably because they’d all done at least some local jail time. The new group called itself “the Lake Dallas Gang” after the area waterway. Clyde thought six assailants would be enough to pull off the raid. At night there were four picket guards outside Eastham’s Camp 1 dormitory. If the Lake Dallas Gang could get the drop on them, they could then break the prisoners out of the dorm before the other guards sleeping on the second floor could wake up and stop them. While many inmates had tried to escape from Eastham, nobody had ever attempted to orchestrate a break from the outside. Eastham was considered too remote and forbidding. That meant the gang should have the advantage of complete surprise. What would happen to most of the escaped prisoners afterward apparently was not discussed, beyond helping as many as possible get clear of Eastham and arming them with the guards’ captured weapons. They would then have to be responsible for maintaining their own freedom. But Clyde was especially concerned that Aubrey Scalley would be broken out. He was grateful to Scalley for taking the rap in the Ed Crowder killing.
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