Because Madora Bucher had unequivocally identified Clyde and Raymond, their guilt was considered a fact rather than a strong possibility. Texas governor Ross Sterling, who’d previously paroled Clyde from prison, authorized a $250 reward for the capture and conviction of each, astronomical at the time when $25 or $50 rewards for aiding in the apprehension of murder suspects were the norm, and the subsequent wanted posters noted “Take no chances on them as they are desperate men.”
Two years earlier at Clyde’s sentencing in Waco, Judge Richard Munroe had warned him that if he kept attempting robberies, someone would be shot and killed. Now that prediction had come true, and Clyde Barrow was no longer running from the West Dallas, Denton, and Kaufman police on charges of petty theft. He was being hunted as a killer, and cops all over Texas were on the lookout for him.
CHAPTER 10
Murder in Stringtown
Though the local newspapers didn’t identify the leading suspects in the Bucher shooting by name, everybody in West Dallas was soon aware that Clyde Barrow was now wanted for murder. Clyde expected the police to stake out the family service station on Eagle Ford Road, so he made only a quick visit after the killing, swearing to his family that it had all been a terrible accident. In fact, Clyde could have hung around home longer. Cumie Barrow wrote in her memoir that in the next few weeks after Bucher was shot, the Dallas police came by the Barrow place only once to see if Clyde was there. It wasn’t a matter of the local cops losing interest in him. But it was one thing for officers with a free hour or two to haul Clyde in for questioning about local burglaries and car thefts. There was little risk he’d violently resist arrest. Now he was on the run in a murder investigation, believed to be armed and ready to pull the trigger, at least according to the testimony of Bucher’s widow. A full-scale, around-the-clock stakeout required manpower the Dallas police didn’t have.
Clyde still wanted to break Ralph Fults out of the Wichita Falls jail, and Bonnie remained locked up in Kaufman. Then in early May, Fults got word to Clyde, probably via a mutual acquaintance, that a rescue attempt wouldn’t be necessary. He had his own escape plan.
In Wichita Falls, Fults shared a cell with Hilton Bybee, a serial murderer recently sentenced to be transferred south and die in the Huntsville prison’s electric chair. Bybee had gotten his hands on some hacksaw blades and invited Fults to break out with him whenever there was an opportunity to cut through the rusty cell bars. On the night of May 10, they made their move. Bybee and Fults managed to get out of their cell, overpower a deputy, and grab his gun. When another officer appeared, Bybee tried to shoot him, but the gun he’d taken misfired. Fults and Bybee were recaptured before they had even gotten out of the building.
Bybee was moved to the fortresslike Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth to await transfer to Huntsville. Fults was tried in Wichita Falls. On May 11, the day after he’d made his escape attempt, Fults was sentenced to ten years for armed robbery. It was a lenient sentence, and Fults was further relieved to be assigned to the Walls main prison unit instead of to another stint at Eastham farm. There he would strike up a friendship with Clyde’s older brother Buck.
For the rest of May 1932 and the first few weeks of June, Clyde contented himself with a series of small holdups in and around Dallas. His family believed he pulled these jobs in partnership with Frank Clause, who along with Raymond Hamilton had been wrongly accused of complicity with Clyde in the Bucher murder. If Clyde and Clause did team up, their efforts weren’t profitable. Marie Barrow later estimated that the total take from her brother’s robberies of several service stations and a liquor store “didn’t even add up to $100.” Clyde was clearly marking time until the Kaufman County grand jury met to decide Bonnie’s fate.
On June 17, Bonnie was called before the grand jury. No transcripts are known to survive, but the gist of her testimony was simple: Bonnie swore she’d been kidnapped by two men who forced her to come along as they unsuccessfully attempted to rob a Kaufman County hardware store and then fled. She must have been convincing—the grand jury ordered her released, and Emma Parker took Bonnie home. Before she left, Bonnie gave her collection of handwritten poems to Mrs. Adams, the wife of the Kaufman jailor. There is little doubt which of the poems meant the most to its creator. Bonnie kept a copy of “Suicide Sal,” and in the months ahead she constantly tinkered with it, substituting various words and phrases but never abandoning the basic theme of a trusting girl betrayed by her crooked lover.
Emma felt her daughter “was soberer, more quiet and a great deal older than the Bonnie who had left home three months before…. We talked the situation over and I pointed out to her the trouble she had caused herself by following her heart instead of her head.” According to Emma, Bonnie replied, “I’m through with [Clyde]. I’m never going to have anything more to do with him.”
The Barrow family knew better. As soon as Bonnie was released, they carried messages back and forth between her and Clyde. Marie Barrow believed “Bonnie was only trying to keep her mother happy.…There was no way she would’ve ever have stayed away from Clyde.” Yet it would have been understandable if Bonnie had meant every word she said to her mother about Clyde. She’d known him for two and a half years. He’d been in jail for nearly half that time, and on the run for most of the rest. Thanks to Clyde, Bonnie had been shot at in Kaufman, bounced on the back of a mule while being chased by a posse, shot at again on the banks of Cedar Creek, arrested and hauled off to jail, and finally interrogated by a grand jury that could have charged her with attempted robbery and sent her to prison. Now Clyde was wanted for murder. If the trends in her boyfriend’s life were any indication, things for Clyde were only going to get worse, and that also went for anyone foolish enough to throw in with him. Logic dictated that Bonnie heed her mother’s advice and stay away from Clyde Barrow forever.
But logic held little attraction for Bonnie Parker. Being logical meant waiting tables again, or, if she couldn’t find an honest job, maybe even working one of the street corners she’d described so vividly in “‘The Prostitutes’ Convention.’” The Depression economy, the swirling dust storms, the tedium and hopelessness of ordinary life—how much worse could life on the run with an accused murderer turn out to be? Maybe her time with Clyde so far hadn’t been the best, and it was bound to end badly, but at least it would never be boring. So, logic be damned. Bonnie sent word to Clyde, probably through the Barrows, that she was ready to rejoin him.
She wasn’t the only one. Raymond Hamilton had been working on a construction crew in Bay City, Michigan. Sometime in June 1932 Raymond was laid off, and since his mother, brother, and sisters lived in West Dallas it was natural for him to head back to Texas. Raymond arrived concerned that there might be some lingering heat from the failed Simms Refinery robbery, and was shocked to learn he was wanted for the Bucher murder. Though Clyde and Raymond had parted with hard feelings on both sides, Marie Barrow had become best friends with Raymond’s little sister Audrey. Clyde soon knew that Raymond was back in town, and at some point the two fugitives met. They apparently settled their differences, because by mid-July, Clyde and Raymond had rented a small house or apartment in Wichita Falls. They used it as a base while committing a series of armed robberies.
Bonnie lived there with them. She told her mother that she’d found a job in a Wichita Falls café. “Something whispered to me that she’d gone to Clyde,” Emma recounted two years later in Fugitives. “[But] in a few days I had a letter from Bonnie telling me all about the new job, where she was staying, and what hours she was working. I heaved a sigh of relief.” Bonnie still hadn’t turned twenty-two, and she remained enough of a child to not want her mother disappointed in her.
The re-formed Barrow-Hamilton team had no more initial luck as thieves than it did back in March. After a holdup at the Grand Prairie “Interurban” train station netted just $12, they decided to hit another small business in Dallas. The Neuhoff Packing Company was a few miles away from the Barrow place on Eagle Ford Roa
d, and on August 1, Clyde dropped Bonnie off at his parents’ service station before driving away with Raymond and Ross Dyer, a new partner recruited for the job because someone was needed to handle the getaway car. It was about 4 P.M., and Cumie Barrow had no doubt what her son and his cohorts were up to. While Bonnie nervously listened to the radio for any news reports, Cumie “asked her why she didn’t try to get [Clyde] not to do it.” Bonnie replied that Clyde “often told her that if she asked him not to do anything like that, he started thinking about it and couldn’t keep his mind on the job.” This conversation seems to mark the beginning of an understanding, if not a friendship, between Cumie and Bonnie. Though she’d previously had plenty of unflattering things to say about her son’s girlfriend, for the remainder of her unpublished memoir Cumie never again wrote negatively about Bonnie.
Soon, Clyde, Raymond, and Ross Dyer returned, picked up Bonnie, and drove away. For a change, things had gone as planned. While Dyer had waited outside at the wheel of the getaway car, Clyde and Raymond went into the building, held three employees at gunpoint, and escaped with $440. That night the gang celebrated in an abandoned farmhouse in nearby Grand Prairie. They stayed there until the afternoon of August 5, when Clyde dropped Bonnie off again at the Barrow service station. From there, she took a taxi to her mother’s house. Bonnie still didn’t want Emma to know she’d gone back to Clyde.
Clyde realized he was persona non grata at Emma Parker’s house, and he also understood Bonnie was very attached to her mother. But letting her enjoy an overnight visit with Emma also gave him, Raymond, and Ross Dyer an opportunity to blow off a little steam. By the beginning of August, Clyde had been wanted for murder for three months. Any initial panic had worn off. There didn’t seem to be much difference between his life as a fugitive now and when he was wanted just for robbery. The successful Neuhoff robbery probably bolstered his confidence, too. So, after telling his mother he’d meet her the next morning “at seven or eight” at a cousin’s house near the Barrow family service station, Clyde was in a party mood as he, Raymond, and Dyer drove their stolen car north from West Dallas. They apparently had no particular destination in mind. They just wanted to get out of town and have some fun.
At about 9 P.M. the trio reached Stringtown, Oklahoma, and saw that many of its nine hundred residents were gathered for a dance at an open pavilion some fifty yards off to the left of the highway. It was a small-scale event in a backwater town. The band consisted of two musicians, one playing guitar and the other the fiddle. Some couples swayed together on a raised wooden dance platform. Everyone else milled about, chatting and laughing. Despite Prohibition, flasks of bootleg liquor, known locally as “wildcat whiskey,” were passed around. No one was charged admission to the dance. The musicians were to be paid by passing the hat. Because it was a neighborly affair where everyone was dressed comfortably in overalls or homespun frocks, it was impossible not to notice the flashy Ford V-8 that rolled into the gravel parking lot and the three strangers in suits who hopped out to join the festivities.
Far from worrying about sticking out in such a country crowd, Clyde, Raymond, and Dyer called further attention to themselves by taking turns ambling over to the raised platform and asking girls to dance. Their poor judgment had the predictable result. Some of the local men, their irritation fueled by alcohol, began grumbling. The outsiders started drinking, too, slugging down whiskey from their flasks just as openly as the Stringtown revelers. Trouble seemed imminent, and two local lawmen decided to do something about it.
During the Depression, many small-town men struggling to support their families were glad to take jobs in law enforcement. Pay was minimal. In some isolated communities, there was no salary at all. Cops received remuneration only when they caught crooks whose crimes were sufficient to merit rewards from the state—$10 to $25 was the usual range. Other county sheriffs made their livings by charging the state a few dollars for each night their jails housed prisoners. Most rural lawmen received no formal training at all in securing prisoners or handling weapons. They were resposible for furnishing their own guns and vehicles. Since they were probably poor if they were applying for these jobs to begin with, the sidearms they carried were mostly small-caliber and cheap, and they usually drove battered old cars or pickups kept in operating condition by baling wire and crossed fingers.
Still, Atoka County undersheriff Eugene Moore was thrilled when he was hired part-time by Sheriff Charlie Maxwell. Moore, thirty-one, had been making a comfortable living as a farmer and investor until he was wiped out by the Depression. He still had a wife and three children to support. No record exists of what Maxwell paid Moore, but it surely wasn’t much. Fifteen dollars a week was about the norm for a full-time deputy. Still, the job in Atoka County wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. Arresting drunks and breaking up fistfights was about as risky as it ever got way out in the country, which was why Maxwell and Moore were on hand at the dance in Stringtown. They didn’t expect trouble, but the combination of young men with girls to impress and whiskey to drink always had the potential for some.
So long as things remained peaceful, Sheriff Maxwell had no intention of rousting his Stringtown constituents for a little illegal boozing. They were just having fun. But the pushy behavior of the three strangers in the fancy suits was bothersome, and when the two-man band took a break Maxwell mentioned to Duke Ellis, the guitar player, that he was going to arrest the trio for drinking before the local boys got riled enough to beat them up. As the band began to play its next set of songs, Maxwell strolled over to where Clyde and Raymond sat in their Ford. Dyer was a dozen yards away on the dance platform. Almost seventy years later Ellis recalled that he’d just hit the first chords of “Way Down Yonder” “when hell broke loose, and I mean hell.”
Later, Clyde swore to his family that everything that happened was really Raymond Hamilton’s fault. It was Raymond, Clyde said, who had insisted that they stop when they spotted the pavilion and heard the music. It was Raymond and Dyer who were foolish enough to try to dance with the local girls. Clyde said he stayed in the car the whole time, not even drinking when Raymond and Dyer did—a direct contradiction of Duke Ellis, who recalled seeing Clyde tipping a flask. Sheriff Maxwell, according to Clyde, approached him in the Ford not for illicit possession of alcohol but because one of the Stringtown boys had reported seeing a gun in the back seat. That is unlikely—according to Ellis, the sheriff “went over real casual” to the car without even drawing his own pistol. He would have been more cautious if he’d been warned about a gun. Probably Clyde just didn’t want to admit to ultra-religious Cumie that he’d been drinking. Like Bonnie with Emma, he didn’t want to disappoint his mother.
Maxwell leaned forward with one foot on the Ford’s running board and told Clyde and Raymond they were under arrest. With the Bucher murder charges hanging over their heads, they weren’t about to meekly surrender. Instead, they pulled their guns and fired at Maxwell. Ellis recalled that the sheriff’s body “went flying back off that running board.” An onlooker named Harry Bryant snatched up Maxwell’s gun and started shooting at Clyde and Raymond. Moore ran up firing his pistol as Clyde yanked the Ford into gear and tried to speed off. But almost immediately he rammed a front tire into the edge of a culvert, and the car overturned. Clyde and Raymond scrambled out, spraying pistol shots back at Bryant and Moore as the crowd screamed and raced for cover. Moore fell down dead. Clyde and Raymond ran into the brush. Tentatively, people emerged from whatever cover they’d found. Ellis and a couple of other strapping young men carried the severely wounded Sheriff Maxwell to the nearest house and laid him on a bed. Within moments, the covers were soaked with blood. According to Ellis, the local bootlegger saved Maxwell’s life by “pouring whiskey down him. He had six bullet holes in him—I counted them.”
Within hours, a massive manhunt was underway, with posses from surrounding towns and counties joining in the chase. Clyde and Raymond managed to stay ahead of their pursuers by stealing a series of cars, the
last of which they abandoned in Grandview just outside Dallas. Ross Dyer initially had it a little easier. He mingled with the panicked crowd during the gunplay, and afterward walked to a nearby bus stop and caught a ride back to Texas. There, his luck ran out. Dyer, who was using the name “Everett Milligan,” was picked up almost immediately in McKinney and taken back to Atoka for questioning. Apparently an all-points bulletin from Oklahoma had reached Texas cops. After being positively identified as one of the three strangers who’d barged in on the Stringtown dance, Dyer was held for further interrogation in the Oklahoma town of McAlester. The Barrow family always assumed he fingered Clyde and Raymond as the shooters. They were undoubtedly right—just two days after Dyer’s arrest, an Oklahoma newspaper identified “Clyde Barrow, wanted for murder of J. Bucher, a merchant of Hill county, Texas” as the main suspect in the killing of Undersheriff Moore. “Raymond Hamilton, pal of Barrow” was named as the second suspect.
At 7 A.M. on August 6, Cumie Barrow went out to meet Clyde in West Dallas. As promised, he and Raymond were waiting at his cousin’s house, sprawled across a bed and keeping watch on the street through a window. Cumie didn’t think Clyde seemed upset in any way. She asked where Ross Dyer was. Clyde replied “We lost him,” and asked his mother if she’d seen the morning papers. Cumie mentioned a story about a lawman being killed in Oklahoma; Clyde and Raymond “looked kind of funny, and I became scared.” When his mother asked if he killed Moore, Clyde denied it. When he finally admitted to her a few days later that he’d been involved in the shooting, he placed most of the blame on Raymond Hamilton.
It was clear to Clyde and his family that a criminal line had been irrevocably crossed. Prior to Stringtown Clyde was already wanted for murder, but he might have been able to wangle a life sentence rather than death in the Huntsville electric chair by convincing a judge and jury that he’d been waiting outside in the getaway car when John Bucher was shot. Texas governors were then still granting frequent paroles to relieve prison overcrowding. If the Bucher murder had been the only killing on his criminal record, Clyde might very well have become a free man again after five or ten more years in Huntsville. But the cold-blooded murder of a lawman ended any chance that he might have had for leniency. In the eyes of the law he was now a serial killer, and police everywhere were renowned for never abandoning the pursuit of a criminal who’d murdered one of their own. There were dozens of Stringtown witnesses to testify that Clyde had shot Eugene Moore. If he was ever captured, Clyde believed he’d receive an automatic conviction and a date with the electric chair.
Jeff Guinn Page 14