Jeff Guinn

by Untold Story of Bonnie;Clyde Go Down Together: The True

  CHAPTER 14

  “It Gets Mixed Up”

  After escaping the ambush in West Dallas on the rainy night of January 6, Clyde raced his Ford V-8 coupé only a few miles north before he missed a turn in the dark. The car veered off the road into a muddy field, where it sank up to its axles. Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. couldn’t budge it. Soon, they knew, the police would be combing the area for them—they had to keep moving. Clyde found a house, pounded on the door, and paid the farmer he woke up $3 to pull the car back onto the road with a team of mules. Once it was free, Clyde drove northeast while Bonnie and W.D. slept. When they woke up they were in the eastern hills of Oklahoma.

  During the next few months from January through March they drove in aimless, meandering patterns through parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. Travel money was acquired in stickups of grocery stores and service stations well away from major cities. The jobs weren’t big enough to merit much attention from the law or any coverage from the area newspapers. For Clyde and Bonnie, this was the time that came closest to the carefree criminal life they’d hoped to enjoy. There was no organized pursuit on their trail. Any small-town cops they encountered could be outrun, or, if necessary, outgunned, but suddenly no shooting seemed necessary. It was as though there had been a bad period when bullets flew everywhere, but now it was past. They carried a tool kit with them, and years later Clyde’s sister Marie would muse that during these months they wielded a screwdriver far more often than they did guns.

  The screwdriver was used to change license plates on the cars they stole, and they changed plates far more often than they did cars. Though Clyde could hot-wire almost any model automobile in seconds, it was still a chore to switch from one vehicle to another because they had so much baggage. There were suitcases packed with their suits, shirts, and fashionable dresses. Bonnie had her typewriter, and Clyde had a guitar. He still loved to play and sing. They had their arsenal of handguns, shotguns, BARs, and boxes of ammunition. Moving everything from one car to the next took a while, so Clyde extended the road life of each stolen vehicle by frequently changing its license plates. They kept a wide variety of license plates on hand, pilfering some in every state they passed through. Clyde always drove. They’d keep going until Clyde announced he was tired and ready to stop. Bonnie handled the road maps.

  W.D. was often called on to act as photographer. Clyde and Bonnie enjoyed posing for pictures. Sometimes they’d strike the same sort of silly poses they had assumed at the photo booths in Fair Park, though now they were waving real guns. Clyde and Bonnie smoked cigarettes but sixteen-year-old W.D. puffed on cigars, probably trying to look and act more grown-up than he was. Once they stopped along the highway and W.D. snapped a photo of Bonnie posing with a gun dangling from her hand and one of his cigars clenched in her teeth. She was just fooling around a little.

  Most nights they stayed in motor courts. In Arkansas and Missouri, the Barrow Gang was still relatively anonymous, so they didn’t have to worry about being recognized. They would rent only one cabin. It was cheaper, and W. D. Jones was afraid of the dark and always wanted to sleep in the same room as Clyde and Bonnie. Later, lawmen in Texas would spread rumors that Bonnie was promiscuous and slept with other members of the Barrow Gang besides Clyde. They had no idea that, at least in the case of W.D., they were telling the literal truth. Having the kid in the room with them certainly imposed on the couple’s privacy, but Clyde had grown up sleeping in tiny rooms with his brothers and sisters. He wasn’t accustomed to privacy anyway. W.D. was often sent out on errands. That was probably when the lovers were intimate. A big surprise for W.D. was discovering that Clyde and Bonnie both prayed frequently. The religious faith ingrained in them by their mothers hadn’t been entirely abandoned.

  Meals were usually taken in their rooms at motor courts or by the side of the road. If they didn’t have much money, the entire menu sometimes comprised bologna-and-cheese sandwiches. For a treat, they’d have buttermilk. Clyde and Bonnie drank whiskey, too, but Clyde was more circumspect. He thought he needed to be constantly alert. Bonnie agreed. If she felt he’d had too much, she’d warn, “The laws might be right on us.”

  There was time, most days, for the kind of personal grooming that remained important to Bonnie. She carefully applied makeup and fussed to make her hair look just right. Bonnie set off her freshly laundered dresses with high-heeled shoes, feeling safe enough during such a relatively stress-free interlude to choose fashion over flat heels and a greater ability to run. Sometimes she colored her hair, going from golden blond to streaky auburn to full-blown red and back again. Clyde liked all the different looks. She dyed his hair a few times, too. Bonnie called Clyde “Daddy,” and his name for her was “Honey.” W.D.’s nickname was “Boy.” He referred to Bonnie as “Sis” and to Clyde by his old childhood nickname of “Bud.” They were especially careful not to call each other by their real names whenever they were out in public because, W.D. told Playboy years later, “somebody at a filling station or a tourist court might pick up on [it] and call the law.” Previously they’d been careless about drawing attention to themselves and they soon would be again, but during this short, idyllic time they exhibited more common sense than usual.

  That was most evident on the evening of January 26, 1933, in Springfield, Missouri. Twenty-four-year-old Thomas Persell had eked out a living selling adding machines before joining the Springfield police force in 1932. He was good at his new job, nabbing two car thieves soon after being hired. That earned him a promotion to motorcycle patrol. About 6 P.M. on January 26 as he cruised through the downtown area, Persell noticed three persons in a V-8 Ford studying parked cars in a suspicious manner. There had been a car theft in town earlier that day. Persell decided to follow the Ford and its occupants as they drove away, and just before an elevated bridge over a railroad track he rode up behind the car and waved the driver over. Clyde, always wary and thinking about potential escape routes, kept going until he was over the bridge. But there was no use trying to outrun a cop on a motorcycle in the middle of town, so he pulled to the side of the road. When Persell got off his motorcycle and walked up, Clyde and W.D. greeted him with drawn guns. But instead of blasting away, Clyde ordered Persell to get in the car. Wisely, he obeyed. W.D. took Persell’s pistol. The patrolman sat between Clyde and W.D. in front. Bonnie was in back.

  Persell said later that Clyde was “quite profane” as he quizzed his prisoner about the fastest way out of town. They drove northeast in the direction of St. Louis for a while, then turned south toward Joplin. Bonnie consulted a road map in the back seat. When they stopped for gas, Clyde made Persell climb into the back with her. Bonnie threw a blanket over Persell and then covered him with a pistol while they were at the service station. When they drove away, Clyde told Persell to clamber back into the front seat. As the patrolman did, he kicked open a suitcase and saw, in his words, “a veritable arsenal bigger than the one at the police station…. They had a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a couple of rifles, I don’t know how many pistols and this Thompson sub-machine gun. They were damn proud of it—like kids with their first toy.” Somehow, conversation in the car turned to the November shootout in Oronogo. Clyde told Persell that “some monkey from the bank” shot at them there. Persell asked if they had been involved in the car theft in Springfield earlier in the day. Clyde said they’d stolen the vehicle, another Ford V-8, but decided they didn’t like its tan color. Helpfully, Clyde told Persell where they’d abandoned the car.

  About five hours after Persell was abducted, the battery in Clyde’s stolen V-8 died—coincidentally, just as they reached the outskirts of Oronogo. Clyde ordered W.D. to walk the rest of the way into town and steal a battery from another car. Further, he had to take Persell with him. It was obviously another test for W.D. The sixteen-year-old led his captive into Oronogo. The town was dark so late at night. W.D. and Persell pried a battery out of a car parked on a residential street and lugged it back to where Clyde and Bonnie were waiting. The b
attery was heavy, and W.D. told Clyde that Persell had helped him carry it.

  When the Ford was running again, Clyde drove a few miles south into Joplin. A little after midnight, he stopped in the suburb of Poundstone’s Corner and told Persell to get out of the car. As a reward for helping W.D. with the battery, Clyde was releasing his prisoner in a town rather than out in the country where he’d have a long walk back to civilization. Persell asked them to return his handgun—it was fitted with custom grips and cost a lot of money. Clyde turned him down and drove away. He’d kept calm throughout the night, even when the car battery died outside Oronogo. Shooting Persell, a lawman, would have made Clyde one of the most widely hunted criminals in all of Missouri. But he let the patrolman go, unharmed. So, besides his indiscreet admission about being part of the Oronogo bank robbery, the kidnapping only earned Clyde a little more notoriety in the southern part of the state.

  During their time in the Missouri section of the Ozarks, Clyde and Bonnie sent a steady stream of postcards to their families back in Texas. Clyde signed the cards “Bud,” Bonnie was “Sis,” and W.D. was “Jack.” Besides the postcards, they sneaked three or four hundred miles into West Dallas for quick visits, at least one a month. Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid might have hoped to trap them, but he didn’t have informers in place yet, nor the personnel to constantly monitor the Barrow service station on Eagle Ford Road. To schedule family gatherings, Clyde and Bonnie would simply drive past and toss out Coke bottles containing messages telling where and when to meet outside of town. As soon as she read Clyde’s instructions, Cumie would phone her daughter Nell and Bonnie’s mother, Emma, using the family code “I’m fixing red beans” to let them know Clyde and Bonnie were in town and ready for a reunion. The Barrows thought Dallas police might be tapping their phone, but they weren’t—yet. Cumie, Nell, L.C., and Marie always went out to see Clyde and Bonnie. Henry sometimes stayed home to keep an eye on the service station. Clyde’s oldest siblings, Jack and Artie, rarely saw their brother. Jack and his wife were raising four daughters and thought it was wise to keep clear of Clyde, who understood. Artie and her husband lived in Denison, seventy-five miles away. Because of the distance involved, Artie usually wasn’t able to see her brother during his brief Dallas visits.

  Bonnie’s mother, Emma, and sister, Billie Jean, always came. Smoot Schmid’s deputies were always on the lookout, and if Clyde and Bonnie had to make two stops for family visits they would be doubling the danger of being caught. Emma Parker and Cumie Barrow even forged a grudging friendship. They had little in common other than loving their outlaw children very much. But that was enough. They spoke regularly on the telephone, sharing their concerns about what would eventually happen to Clyde and Bonnie.

  During their visits, Clyde and Bonnie gave their families money, sometimes as much as $100 or more if they had it. But even a few dollars made a difference. Marie Barrow told friends later, probably exaggerating only a little, that Clyde’s gifts often kept the rest of the West Dallas Barrows from going hungry. The service station didn’t always provide Henry with sufficient income. The Depression and the Dust Bowl still throttled the Texas economy. Even proud Emma Parker took handouts from Bonnie, knowing full well she was accepting stolen money. W. D. Jones rarely had anything to give his mother, Tookie. Clyde and Bonnie kept all the money from their robberies. Clyde occasionally gave W.D. a dollar, like a father doling out an allowance.

  On one visit, Nell had a question for her brother Clyde. How did it feel, she asked, to know that he’d killed someone? According to Fugitives (written by journalist Jan I. Fortune with the help of Nell Barrow and Emma Parker), Clyde gave a rambling, philosophic answer, with Hamlet-like digressions about why “God should bother with the whole mess.” Almost every word of it seems phony. Clyde was never given to orations. In common with much of the other dialogue in Fugitives, it sounds like something Fortune conjured up. But Clyde’s actual response may be buried in the verbiage: “It gets mixed up.” In less than a year since being paroled from prison, he’d killed three men—Eugene Moore, Doyle Johnson, and Malcolm Davis—and been blamed for murdering two more. For all the excuses he offered his family—about not wanting to stop at the Stringtown dance in the first place, or wildly shooting his gun in the dark during the West Dallas ambush only because others were shooting at him first—the deaths had to hang heavy on the conscience of a twenty-two-year-old who was still devout enough to say his nightly prayers. Driving around the Ozarks, hundreds of miles from the scenes of his fatal crimes, Clyde might have been able to put the murders out of his mind for a while. But they were ultimately inescapable. Things were badly mixed up for Clyde Barrow, and not even God could make it all go away.

  The visits to West Dallas helped. They were proof that despite the things Clyde had done, there were still people who cared about him. Family ties meant everything to Clyde, which is why he never mocked Bonnie’s strong attachment to her mother and her sister, Billie Jean. A few times, he even allowed Billie Jean Parker to come with them. Billie Jean had endured some tough luck of her own. Her husband, Fred Mace, was in prison for burglary and she was back living with her mother. Every once in a while Bonnie would tell Billie Jean, “I get so lonesome to talk about home,” and ask her sister to ride with them for a few days. Billie Jean and Fred Mace had two small children; apparently they were looked after by their grandmother Emma when their mother went out on the road with the Barrow Gang. Billie Jean shared their car and single room at the motor courts, but she was still just an occasional companion for Bonnie.

  For three months, beginning on Christmas Eve in 1932, the full-time members of the gang were Clyde, Bonnie, and W. D. Jones. But in late March 1933, they added two more, by accident rather than design. One was Clyde’s big brother Buck. The other was Buck’s wife, Blanche, who didn’t want anything to do with criminals and crime. She believed that being around Clyde and Bonnie would lead to disaster for her and her husband. She was right.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Shootout in Joplin

  Buck Barrow still had four years left to serve on his robbery sentence when he voluntarily had returned to the Texas state prison in Huntsville on December 27, 1931. As soon as he was back in custody, his mother, Cumie, and wife, Blanche, began petitioning the governor’s office to parole him. Meanwhile, Clyde was paroled just a few weeks after Buck gave himself up. While Buck readjusted to life as an inmate, his little brother embarked on the crime spree that soon, with the enthusiastic support of the Texas press, made him the most notorious outlaw in the state.

  Whenever Blanche, Cumie, and Buck’s sisters Nell and Marie came to visit him in Huntsville, Buck wanted to talk about Clyde. He felt responsible for Clyde’s predicament—after all, he was the one who had inspired his kid brother to get started in crime by stealing cars. Buck was seven years older, and Clyde had always looked up to him. If he talked to Clyde, Buck believed, he could convince him to either give himself up or else leave the country for good. There were all sorts of places where an American on the run could hide in Mexico. And if Clyde did choose to turn himself in, plenty of Texas murderers were being sentenced to long prison terms instead of the electric chair. By surrendering instead of being captured, Clyde might incline a jury toward leniency.

  Buck swore that he himself would never turn to crime again. All he wanted was to get out of Huntsville, talk some sense into Clyde, and then build a new, law-abiding life with Blanche. She was living in Denison and working at the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, which was owned by Buck’s sister Artie. The original plan when Buck gave himself up was for Blanche to live at the West Dallas service station with Buck’s parents, plus his brother L.C. and sister Marie. It didn’t work out. Cumie never liked having women other than her daughters around the house. Blanche thought Cumie resented Buck’s devotion to his wife. Within a few months Artie suggested that Blanche move to Denison and learn how to dye hair and give permanent waves. It was a relief to everyone when she did.

  So on Mar
ch 23, 1933, after Buck was set free in Huntsville he stopped in West Dallas only to change clothes before hurrying up to Denison. He had great news for Blanche. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, the new Texas governor, had granted him a full pardon instead of a simple parole. That meant all Buck’s previous crimes were completely wiped from the legal record as though he had never committed them. He and Blanche could truly make a fresh start. Buck was thirty, and Blanche just twenty-two. They had plenty of time to build a wonderful life together—but first, even though Blanche begged him not to, Buck wanted to find Clyde and talk to him.

  It didn’t take long. The day after Buck returned, he and Blanche went to visit her mother and stepfather, who owned a small dairy farm in Wilmer, about fifteen miles outside Dallas. Blanche was probably less excited about seeing her mother, with whom she’d always had a tense relationship, than she was to be reunited with her dog, a tiny white mongrel named Snow Ball. Cumie Barrow disliked the dog, and hadn’t let Blanche keep Snow Ball while she lived at the service station in West Dallas. Blanche took it as just one more indication of Cumie’s meanness, and asked her mother to board the animal.

  Buck and Blanche decided to spend the night on the farm. About midnight, there was a knock on the door. Blanche’s stepfather opened it, and found Clyde, Bonnie, and W. D. Jones outside. They’d gone to West Dallas for a quick visit and learned from Clyde’s family that Buck had been pardoned, and that he and Blanche were probably at her mother’s place in Wilmer. The house on the dairy farm was two-storied, and the bedroom where Buck and Blanche were sleeping was on the second floor. Buck recognized Clyde’s voice and hurried downstairs. Blanche stayed in bed. Her husband led all three visitors up to see her—Blanche wasn’t charmed. Clyde and W.D. both carried shotguns. Bonnie was drunk, and Blanche thought she looked like she hadn’t slept for a week.