Jeff Guinn
Page 13
But when he rejoined his partners later in the day in Denton, Clyde learned Hammett hadn’t followed through, and Ted Rogers and Johnny Russell had no idea where he and Ralph Allsup were. Clyde couldn’t wait until Hammett and Allsup reappeared. That night, Clyde, Rogers, and Russell hit the hardware store in Celina that Hammett had been supposed to rob. They got away with some rifles and shotguns, but not before mistakenly breaking into a nearby drugstore and having to lock three prisoners, including the Celina mayor, in an empty railroad boxcar. They also took $14 from the mayor. The pair of other captives had only $2 between them.
The next afternoon, Clyde, Russell, and Rogers found another spot on the banks of Lake Dallas to test-fire their new guns. Clyde wanted to be certain there would be no misfires when they tried to free Bonnie and Fults. Unlike the flawed weapons purchased from the pawnbroker in Illinois, these guns worked well—too well. A farmer working in a nearby field was alarmed at what sounded like an endless barrage of shots. He called Denton County sheriff G. C. Cockrell, who loaded several deputies into a car and hurried out to investigate. Clyde’s senses were always keen. He heard rustlings in the brush and correctly assumed “the laws” were approaching. Though they had to abandon the Celina arsenal, Clyde, Russell, and Rogers were able to sneak away on foot before Cockrell and his men could catch them. But even as those three members of the Lake Dallas Gang escaped, the missing duo of Jack Hammett and Ralph Allsup drove up looking for their partners. Cockrell arrested them, and also took possession of the Ford V-8 Clyde had stolen and driven back to Denton during his escape two days earlier.
Over the next few days, everything the Lake Dallas Gang had planned fell apart as various county and town law enforcement agencies sent out and responded to bulletins. In Texas during the early 1930s immediate communication was always a problem between regional police departments, especially those in isolated rural areas. Phone service was intermittent; telegrams were most often used to report crimes and disseminate descriptions of fugitives. Often, telegram delivery wasn’t prompt. But when prisoners and apparently stolen property were in custody, laws officers in far-flung, smaller communities had time to compare notes. In this instance, the Denton County sheriff sent out word about his haul of captives, weapons, and a car, and there were multiple responses. The owner of the Celina hardware store confirmed the guns had been stolen from his shop on the night of the 20th. The stolen Ford was linked to the escape of the so far unidentified “third man” who’d participated in the aborted Kaufman robbery on the night of April 19. A pistol found among the Lake Dallas arsenal was claimed by Electra sheriff James T. Taylor, who explained how it had been taken from him ten days earlier. Taylor was then taken to see the man captured by the Kemp posse. He identified Fults as one of his two kidnappers. So did mail carrier Bill Owens. Finally, one of Clyde’s Kaufman County pursuers erroneously identified Jack Hammett as the third fugitive who’d managed to escape from Cedar Creek. The crimes in Electra, Kaufman, and Celina were now linked. That meant Hammett, Allsup, and Fults faced lengthy prison terms. (Bonnie was being held only for the attempted robbery in Kaufman.) After just a few days in Kaufman County custody, Fults was sent to Wichita Falls to be tried on kidnapping charges. That was considered the more serious crime, and its prosecution took precedence.
Though he remained at large, Clyde was still in desperate straits. He, Rogers, and Russell had nothing but the clothes they wore and the weapons they carried when they raced away on foot to escape Denton County sheriff Cockrell and his men. There’s no record of where Rogers and Russell hid themselves immediately after April 21, but within a few days Clyde made his way back to West Dallas. He soon learned that Fults had been moved to Wichita Falls while Bonnie had been transferred from the tiny one-room Kemp jail to the larger jail in Kaufman. Hammett and Allsup were in custody somewhere, too, but Clyde apparently wasn’t worried about them.
For one of the few times in his life, Clyde tried to reason things through rather than act impulsively. The Eastham raid was clearly a lost cause. The three participants left—Clyde, Russell, and Rogers—didn’t comprise a large enough assault force to pull it off, and, besides, they no longer had the guns and big, fast cars that were necessary. Clyde himself was still wanted by the West Dallas police for the botched Simms Refinery job. He probably assumed, correctly, that he hadn’t yet been identified as a participant in the Electra, Kaufman, or Celina crimes, so at least there was only local rather than regional heat for him to avoid. But Fults was in terrible trouble. A conviction for kidnapping, along with additional sentences for burglary attempts, would send him straight back to Huntsville and possibly Eastham Prison Farm. Bonnie was in less danger. True, she was stuck in jail at least until June when the Kaufman County grand jury would next convene and decide whether to charge her with anything. The odds were that they wouldn’t. She had taken Fults’s advice, and told her captors that she’d been kidnapped and forced to accompany him and Clyde. When L.C. and Blanche met with Bonnie in the Kaufman jail after her cap ture and transfer from Kemp, they reinforced that suggestion. Bonnie had never been previously arrested, let alone charged with any crimes. Texas juries were notorious for leniency toward women. If Bonnie behaved herself in jail and didn’t say anything to incriminate herself, she would probably walk away as a free woman in June. Any attempt by Clyde to break her out before that would put him at risk; even if he did set Bonnie free, her cooperation in an escape attempt would indicate she’d been a willing participant on the night of April 19, and then she’d be a fugitive on the run, too.
No matter what Clyde decided to do about Bonnie and Fults, he knew he needed money for traveling expenses and to buy better guns for potential shootouts with the law. Attempts to steal guns in Kaufman and Celina had gone awry. It seemed smarter to rob a small business somewhere and then purchase whatever weapons were needed. At least he still had Johnny Russell and Ted Rogers to help him.
So Clyde decided that acquiring a new bankroll was his first priority. From there, he’d find a way to free Fults before his friend was shipped back to Huntsville. Bonnie would have to cool her heels in Kaufman for another six weeks or so. If the grand jury did indict her in June, he could plot a breakout scheme then. This was pragmatic rather than romantic reasoning, and because Clyde couldn’t go himself, he sent L.C. and Blanche back to Kaufman to inform Bonnie, who never would have placed pragmatism ahead of love.
Decades later in an unpublished memoir, Marie, Clyde’s little sister, recalled that Bonnie wasn’t upset by Clyde’s decision. Various members of the Barrow family regularly visited her in the Kaufman jail, bearing gifts of clothing and snacks and constantly assuring her that Clyde would be waiting when she was released in June. “She was glad to see us and didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of bitterness against Clyde or our family,” Marie wrote. In her memoir, Clyde’s mother, Cumie, added that her son gave her money to buy Bonnie shoes and underwear. He also brought home a dress he wanted his mother to take to Kaufman, but Cumie “didn’t know where the dress came from”—obviously, she thought it was stolen—and took Bonnie one of Marie’s dresses instead. Bonnie and Marie were about the same size, both very short and slender.
But it would have been very unlike Bonnie not to have at least occasional panic attacks. She couldn’t be certain that Clyde meant his promise to be waiting when she was released. Her husband, Roy Thornton, had deserted her—maybe all men were like that. When Emma Parker heard about Bonnie’s incarceration and rushed to Kaufman, her daughter had plenty to say about Clyde Barrow. As Emma later recalled, none of it was good. Bonnie swore she was through with Clyde forever. Stressed, scared, and lonely, she probably wasn’t really certain how she felt about him.
Though Clyde was willing to let Bonnie remain in jail until her grand jury hearing, Emma considered bailing her out. There was, Emma wrote, “a crazy negro woman” in the cell next to Bonnie, and she didn’t want her daughter exposed to that sort of person. But Emma talked with the wife of the Kaufman jailor
, who persuaded her that a short jail stint might be just what Bonnie needed to cure her attraction to the criminal element. According to Emma, the jailor’s wife, identified only as Mrs. Adams, counseled that “they really haven’t a thing against her…she’s not suffering, and time to think matters over may mean all the difference in the world to the child in the future.”
So Bonnie Thornton—the authorities called her by her married name—languished in a jail cell, though on nice days jailor Adams permitted her to sit outside on the lawn. If it was less than an idyllic existence, it wasn’t especially unpleasant, either. Bonnie whiled away the hours writing poetry. Mrs. Adams gave her some old bank forms to use as stationery. Between April 20, when she was caught, and June 17, when the Kaufman grand jury convened, Bonnie composed a collection of verse she whimsically titled Poetry From Life’s Other Side. All ten poems reflect outstanding penmanship, a credible vocabulary, pedestrian rhyming skills, and an inordinate fondness for quotation marks. A few are quite maudlin—in verse as well as in life, Bonnie enjoyed a good cry. Her choice of subject matter, and how Bonnie viewed the fictional participants in these imaginary adventures, are certainly indicative of her mixed emotions about her current plight. “I’ll Stay” promises an absent lover that “I’ll stay with you forever/Whether you are wrong or right,” but “The Fate of Tiger Rose” relates that its protagonist “looks old and bent/And her years are spent/Walking this ‘prison yards’/But once she was fair/With golden hair/Tho her eyes were somewhat hard.”
At 105 lines, the longest poem by far is “The Story of ‘Suicide Sal,’” about a naive country girl from Wyoming who falls for the slick patter of Jack, a “heat man” from “Chi.” The innocent Sal is lured into crime by her lover, admitting “Jack was just like a ‘god’ to me.” During a robbery attempt, Jack flees while Sal is captured and sentenced to a “5 to 50” year sentence. Jack sends word that he’ll break Sal out, but as time passes she wonders if he’s really coming:
I took the “rap” like a “sportsman,”
Not even one “squawk” did I make,
Jack “dropped himself” on the “promise”
We’d make a “sensational break.”
Well to shorten a lengthy sad story,
Five years have gone over my head,
Without even as much as a letter,
At first I thought he was dead.
A short while ago I “discovered”
From a gal in the “joint” named “Kate,”
That Jack and his “moll” had “got [married]”
And was planning on “going straight.”
Now if he had returned to me some time,
Tho he hadn’t a penny to give,
I’d forget all this “hell” he has caused me,
And love him as long as I live.
But theres no chance of his ever coming
For he and his “moll” have no fears,
But that I will die in this “prison,”
Or else “flatten” this fifty years.
Sal is released after serving five years, but since “State’s prison” would “poison” a “goddess’s mind,” the “jilted gangster’s gal”—Bonnie’s alter ego—is gunned down by someone’s tommy gun two days later.
Emma Parker read the poem during a jail visit and was horrified. “It was clear from the numerous quotations used in the poem that Bonnie was learning the jargon of gangdom, and striving desperately to fit into it and become part of it,” she wrote in Fugitives. “I realize that I am not learned in such matters, but to my inner consciousness there seemed to be a strange and terrifying change taking place in the mind of my child.” Emma could be forgiven for near-hysteria; her younger daughter, Billie Jean’s, husband, Fred Mace, was arrested for burglary just two weeks after Bonnie landed in jail. Her proud opinion of the Parker family was shaken, but it would have been worse had Emma seen two other poems Bonnie wrote in the Kaufman jail. “The Girl with the Blue Velvet Band” is an account of “a Hop Fiend” and her drug addiction. “‘The Prostitutes’ Convention’” (Bonnie used quotation marks to set off the title) is nothing less than a roll call of Dallas hookers and a listing of the street corners where they worked. Some of “the broads” indulge themselves in a “pop” of “Sweet Morphine” before “the laws” come to break up the fun. Even if Bonnie never dabbled in drugs or turned a trick herself, she’d been around such scenes enough to describe them in detail. Emma Parker believed her sweet daughter was corrupted by Clyde—she said as much all the rest of her life, including to members of the Barrow family, who didn’t appreciate it—but these poems lend credence to the strong possibility that Bonnie was at least a part-time prostitute, and perhaps even an abuser of drugs, before she ever began her relationship with Clyde Barrow.
While Bonnie stewed, writing verse and fluctuating between devotion to and disdain for her boyfriend, Clyde was formulating a plan for a quick-hit robbery, after which he’d break Ralph Fults out of the Wichita Falls jail. He thought of a likely target. According to the memoir of Marie Barrow, during the time three years earlier when Clyde had been running with Frank Clause, he’d met another young man named Bucher whose parents ran a combination jewelry store/general store/optician’s practice/garage in the town of Hillsboro sixty miles south of Dallas. Sometime during the last few days of April 1932, Clyde, Ted Rogers, and Johnny Russell stole a car and drove down to check the place out as a potential target. It looked promising. With such a variety of goods sold there—everything from tools to musical instruments—there had to constantly be money in the till, and the jewelry operation almost guaranteed there would be bracelets, necklaces, watches, and other valuable items kept in a safe. Sixty-year-old John N. Bucher, the owner, was also well known in Hillsboro for owning one of the first automobiles in town. He lived with his wife in an apartment above the store. Bucher was proud of the shop—an old photo shows that almost half of its front window was obscured by a huge sign proclaiming “J. N. BUCHER JEWELER GRADUATE OPTICIAN.”
Rogers, Russell, and Clyde explored the store, pretending to examine guitars and hammers and watch fobs. They noted a heavy safe directly across the aisle from the main counter. True, it was too big to attempt to crack by hand. They’d have to make Bucher open it, perhaps at gunpoint. But in general everything seemed in place for a quick, clean job until Clyde noticed Bucher’s wife, Madora, staring at him. Mrs. Bucher had briefly met Clyde through her son. She didn’t speak to Clyde, but he felt certain she’d recognized him.
Clyde wanted to call off the robbery, but Rogers and Russell wouldn’t pass up such a potentially lucrative heist. They suggested that they return to Hillsboro well after dark so there would be few pedestrians. They would park in front of the shop, and Clyde could stay in the car while the other two knocked on the door and asked Bucher to open up, using the pretext that they needed to buy some small item or other. Proprietors of small-town Texas general stores would routinely do business with after-hours customers. Bucher would let them in, they’d offer to pay using a large denomination bill, and Bucher would have to open the safe to make change. When he did, they’d pull their guns, clean out the safe, and be gone before anyone could stop them. There would be no opportunity for Madora Bucher to see Clyde again, and she certainly wouldn’t recognize Rogers and Russell.
Marie Barrow wrote later in her unpublished memoir that Clyde “felt the job was jinxed.” But he needed his share of the take; Fults was scheduled to be tried in Wichita Falls around May 10 and had to be broken out before then. So about 10 P.M. on April 30, Clyde drove up in front of the Bucher store. Russell and Rogers banged on the door, and when Bucher finally got downstairs to let them in they said they wanted to buy guitar strings. These cost a quarter. Russell and Rogers offered a ten-dollar bill in payment. Though surviving accounts of what happened next differ in many respects, it’s certain that Madora Bucher came downstairs and the two Denton County crooks pulled out their pistols. Either Mrs. Bucher or her husband opened the safe, which held
a gun besides some jewelry and a small stack of currency. Bucher went for the gun, and Ted Rogers fired. Bucher died shortly afterward.
Waiting in the car out on the street, Clyde heard a shot. Rogers and Russell rushed out of the store, jumped in, and told him to get going. When they finally stopped to look, their take amounted to about $40 in cash, plus jewelry worth perhaps $1,500. The incident marked the end of what remained of the Lake Dallas Gang. Clyde, Rogers, and Russell each took a third of the loot and went their separate ways. Clyde hadn’t gone inside, hadn’t drawn a gun, hadn’t fired a shot—but under Texas law, if he was ever identified as a participant, he would be just as guilty of Bucher’s murder as his partner who pulled the trigger.
Clyde certainly hoped Madora Bucher wouldn’t identify him. Maybe he’d been wrong about being recognized by her on the afternoon before the killing. But the Hillsboro cops asked the Dallas police for help in investigating the murder, and the Dallas lawmen brought mug shots of potential suspects for Mrs. Bucher to look at. The photos included one of Clyde, and she immediately picked him out. That led the officers from Dallas to show her a mug shot of Raymond Hamilton. Since the failed Simms robbery on March 25, the Dallas police—who knew Raymond well as a bicycle and car thief—assumed he was still running with Clyde. Ted Rogers, the Lake Dallas Gang member who shot her husband, looked very much like Hamilton, and Madora Bucher picked Raymond’s photo out, too. Now the Dallas cops believed they’d identified Clyde and Raymond as two of the three robbers, and even though Mrs. Bucher couldn’t be certain since she hadn’t seen the driver of the getaway car, they felt sure they knew the identity of the third. Because of their frequent arrests together in the late 1920s, Dallas police thought Frank Clause remained Clyde’s constant partner in crime. And so, police departments throughout Texas received bulletins that Clyde Barrow, Raymond Hamilton, and Frank Clause were wanted for the murder of John N. Bucher in Hillsboro.