Jeff Guinn

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

  That worried them. The gunshot wound W.D. had sufferred in Joplin still wasn’t completely healed. He might have been picked up by some Arkansas or Louisiana small-town cops. If the kid was still free, he’d have no idea where the rest of the gang was. In that event, it seemed likely W.D. would make his way back to West Dallas, since he knew Clyde and Bonnie would continue making periodic trips there to see their families. So for the first time since Joplin, the Barrow Gang headed home.

  Their visit was kept short. The Ruston kidnapping had generated a new wave of stories, meaning that Sheriff Smoot Schmid and his deputies had fresh incentive for setting a West Dallas trap. To Schmid and other lawmen, almost everything about the Barrow Gang—where they traveled, what places they chose to rob, how they at times seemed determined not to hurt anyone and at others showed no compunction about killing—was frustratingly random. The only constant was their visits to their families. This time, Clyde didn’t bother driving by the family service station and tossing out a Coke bottle with a note about a late-night meeting. He just parked in the driveway for five minutes while his mother, father, and sister Marie came out to stand by the car. Clyde told them that if and when W.D. showed up, he was to sit tight. They’d come back for him when they could. But Cumie was less interested in her friend Tookie’s youngest child than in one of her own sons. She pleaded with Buck to stay in West Dallas and give himself up. In the immediate aftermath of Joplin, Cumie had told Dallas reporters that both her boys must have been framed, but of course she knew better. Now she didn’t bother suggesting that Clyde surrender, too. With the deaths of two more lawmen on his record, he was beyond any possibility of mercy. Buck gently informed his mother that “there isn’t a chance in the world for me to get by the chair.” He’d been at Joplin, he’d fired a shotgun in a gunfight where two lawmen died, and now the cops had his picture and name plastered on every post office bulletin board. All he could do was remain part of the Barrow Gang until the moment came when they finally didn’t escape. Clyde interrupted to say he would write and sign a statement swearing that Buck and Blanche had only been visiting him and Bonnie in Joplin—they weren’t part of the gang and had found themselves in the middle of the shootout by accident. Marie thought “Clyde was now talking to Buck like Buck had talked to Clyde before the Joplin fight.” Buck didn’t think that would work, either. So they said goodbye, and Clyde sped away down Eagle Ford Road. Every moment they weren’t moving was dangerous.

  They headed north out of Texas again. Clyde apparently liked driving on Highway 69, which rolled smoothly all the way through Kansas and into Minnesota. They spent several days in Indiana, and probably circled back through Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Blanche Barrow wrote that “when we needed money, which was often, some filling station, grocery store or drug store was robbed.” They weren’t staging these robberies to fund a lavish lifestyle. They were just trying to get away with enough money for gas, food, and clothing. While the gang was always eager to break into armories and hardware stores to grab guns, there is no record of them sneaking into a department store to stock up on suits, dresses, and shoes. On visits to West Dallas, they’d hand money over to L.C. and Marie, who’d make Clyde’s and Bonnie’s clothing purchases at nice downtown Dallas stores, adding a few items for themselves in the process. Apparently for Clyde and Bonnie, it was a point of pride to have money for wardrobe purchases in hometown establishments where, in their old lives, they could never have afforded to shop. L.C. purchased many of Clyde’s snappy suits and hats at Harry the Haberdasher’s, a swanky store across the street from the downtown courthouse where local lawmen met to plot the capture of the Barrow Gang. It was another way of putting one over on the Dallas establishment.

  Everyone was sick of camping in the car. Besides the obvious inconveniences, the Dust Bowl was still raging. Getting caught in even the slightest of the swirling storms meant picking dirt from between their teeth for days afterward. But checking into a motor court was no longer a daily option. Thanks to the media, the Barrow Gang, Clyde and Bonnie especially, were now familiar names and faces. The woman checking them into a cabin, the man parking his car next to theirs in the motor court lot, might recognize them and contact the police. Though the motor courts were becoming more ubiquitous, they were still usually found on the outskirts of midsized to major cities. “The laws” were never more than a few minutes away from any of them. So the gang risked a layover at a motor court only when they were either convinced it was isolated enough to be safe, or else they were so worn out they were willing to accept the additional risk. Other famous criminals like Dillinger and Pretty Boy didn’t have to stoop to grimy motor court cabins. Whenever they wanted a break from the pressures of evading the law, they could spend a few days in a safe house in places like St. Paul or Kansas City. These were usually quiet, nicely decorated lodgings—hotel rooms or apartments—and payoffs to local cops ensured uninterrupted privacy. But staying in such places cost amounts far beyond the Barrow Gang’s means. Clyde also lacked the underworld connections to know where these safe houses were, and how to arrange for their use.

  But if fame deprived them of much opportunity to stay in motor courts, it proved quite helpful when the Barrow Gang wanted to spend a night in beds rather than a car. If “laws” and potential stool pigeons all over the country were aware of them now, so were hardworking people anxious to help out the newest American folk heroes. Before, when Clyde and Bonnie appeared and asked to stay the night at some farm family’s isolated house, they were welcomed for whatever small sum they might pay or the gift they’d leave for the privilege. Nobody knew who they were, and no one wanted to. Now such families might very well recognize the gang from newspaper stories or crime magazines or newsreels, and they’d be invited in because people thought it was exciting to harbor criminal celebrities. Clyde didn’t disregard the potential for betrayal. He had huge rewards on his head. So he, Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche would stay in most homes no longer than one night.

  Clyde and Bonnie liked it when their new acquaintances recognized them. Bonnie had always wanted to be famous. Now that she was, she didn’t want to be well known for the wrong reason. Bonnie told everyone that she absolutely, positively did not smoke cigars. She did other things to protect her newfound celebrity. Bonnie still drank, often quite a lot. But she began to carry lemons with her. Whenever she took a drink, afterward Bonnie chewed on pieces of lemon peel, partly to cut the burn of the liquor and also to have the smell of lemon rather than liquor on her breath. This wasn’t unique to Bonnie—lots of Texas girls did it. But because she was so well known it became a sort of trademark for her, noticed and commented upon enough so that lawmen became aware of it.

  If starstruck fans hosting or otherwise spending time with the gang felt disappointed with Bonnie, it was usually in another regard. They’d seen her posed pictures, they’d read descriptions of her in newspapers and crime magazines, and they expected to meet a young woman of exceptional beauty and sexual allure. Bonnie was supposed to be a vamp, a real-life femme fatale. In person she was nice-looking enough, even cute, but they often had anticipated something more. Buck’s wife, Blanche, just a year younger than Bonnie, was much more striking, a fact Bonnie undoubtedly realized and didn’t appreciate. But if Bonnie couldn’t win the hearts of everyone with her looks, she could still use her personality to charm them. Joking, telling stories about her adventures with Clyde, flirting just enough, Bonnie knew how to make people believe she thought they were special, and they responded accordingly. Because she talked much more than Clyde and because she was clearly smart, some people believed that Bonnie Parker was really the brains of the Barrow Gang. The suggestion became widespread enough that Marie Barrow, in both her unpublished and published memoirs, repeatedly emphasized that her brother Clyde was the boss of the gang, period. W. D. Jones felt compelled to tell Playboy decades later that “Bonnie was the only one Clyde trusted all the way. But not even Bonnie had a voice in the decisions. His leadership was undisputed
.”

  Under Clyde’s leadership, on May 11 the gang tried to rob another bank. This one was the Lucerne State Bank in Lucerne, Indiana. Clyde had a new strategy—he was trying to learn from past mistakes. On the 11th, a Thursday, he and Buck cased the place, and then late that night Bonnie and Blanche dropped them off and drove their latest stolen Ford V-8 out of sight. Clyde and Buck broke into the bank, hid themselves, and waited until morning. The idea was to get the drop on the bank clerks when they arrived at work, before the bank officially opened for business. Then there wouldn’t be any customers to get in the way.

  In theory, it made sense. In practice, it was a fiasco. Bank staffers Everett Gregg and Lawson Selders arrived at 7:30 on Friday morning. As soon as the men were inside, Clyde and Buck popped out of their hiding places and ordered them to put up their hands. But officials at the Lucerne State Bank also had a plan in place in case of attempted robbery. Gregg had a rifle hidden somewhere, probably behind his cashier’s desk. It hadn’t occurred to Clyde and Buck to search the place for guns. Gregg and the would-be thieves exchanged wild shots. No one was hit.

  At that moment, Bonnie and Blanche roared up in the Ford. Bonnie was driving. They’d expected to see Clyde and Buck running from the bank with bags of money. Instead, the men were fleeing empty-handed from a man with a rifle. They leaped into the car, and Clyde took over at the wheel. Getting out of town wasn’t easy. Early risers were strolling along the street. One of them, hearing the gunshots and guessing that a robbery attempt was in progress, chunked a thick piece of wood in front of the Ford. Clyde had to swerve into someone’s yard to get around it. Another man leaped onto the hood of the Ford. Clyde screamed at Bonnie to shoot him. She grabbed a gun and fired a few wild shots. The man got off the hood, scared enough to desist even though Bonnie had missed him. She later told her family that she’d missed deliberately—he had white hair, and she didn’t want to hurt an old man.

  But the disaster wasn’t finished yet. More townspeople were swarming toward the scene. People shot at the Ford, and its panicky occupants fired back. Two women, Doris Minor and Ethel Jones, were slightly wounded. They were luckier than some pigs being herded across the road in the Ford’s path. Clyde plowed his car right through them. Two hogs were killed—the only fatalities in Lucerne that morning.

  Afterward, Clyde was undeterred. He decided to try the same strategy at another bank. Over a year earlier in March 1932, out on the road with Raymond Hamilton and Ralph Fults, he’d spotted a likely target in Okabena, Minnesota, only to call off the job when the streets there were too treacherous with late-winter ice and snow. But more than a year later, in spring, the First State Bank of Okabena would do very well. Ever since Joplin, Clyde had shown a renewed interest in bank robbery. Though the gang had been supporting itself since the April 13 shootout in Missouri with the usual Barrow run of smaller grocery store and service station holdups, Clyde may have decided that such small-scale stuff was really beneath the dignity of America’s most newly famous criminals. At least every once in a while they should attempt something grander. Besides, he had Buck with him now, and Bonnie had proven she could drive the getaway car. Blanche refused to take any active role, but she seemed resigned to life on the run. She could have gone back to her father in Oklahoma or her mother in Texas anytime she wanted. No one was making her stay.

  On the night of May 18, Bonnie and Blanche dropped Clyde and Buck off behind the bank building in Okabena. They broke in, hid there overnight, and in the morning caught two arriving employees by surprise. Unlike Everett Gregg of the Lucerne State Bank, these two didn’t have guns handy. When a pair of customers arrived, Buck and Clyde took them prisoner, too. They snatched up all the money they could—about $1,600, $700 of which was in gleaming silver dollars. One of the prisoners managed to trigger an alarm as the Barrow brothers ran into the street with their lumpy sacks of loot and jumped into the waiting Ford V-8 with Bonnie and Blanche. Some alert Okabena citizens shot at them as they drove away, and the gang returned fire. No one was hit. For a change, the Barrow Gang wasn’t even initially blamed for the robbery. Two local cons, Floyd and Anthony Strain, along with Anthony’s wife, Mildred, were arrested and convicted of the crime. But Barrow family members later admitted that Clyde and Buck pulled off the theft—Cumie and Marie even wrote in their unpublished memoirs about seeing all the silver dollars.

  They saw them because Clyde and Bonnie’s immediate goal after the Okabena job was to get back home as soon as possible to share the take with their struggling families. Conflicting dates have been given as to when this meeting east of Dallas took place. In her memoir Blanche Barrow remembers she was sent ahead by bus on Mother’s Day to arrange the get-together, but Mother’s Day in 1933 fell on May 14, four days before the Okabena heist. Probably the gang made its brief visit home a week later. It wasn’t the easiest trip. At one point, jammed into their car with guns and suitcases, Clyde and Buck lost their tempers and got into a fistfight. Blanche, sitting between them, recalled later that she got hit more than they did. She also embellished her husband’s heroic conduct in the scrap. According to Blanche, Buck told Clyde they could get out of the car and continue swinging, while Clyde reached for a shotgun before backing down. To Blanche, it seemed like the brothers were no longer able to get along—in her mind, it was all Clyde’s fault because he was so bossy. Some tension between the two was inevitable. Buck was used to telling his kid brother what to do. Clyde believed he was the undisputed leader of the Barrow Gang. But by the time they arrived back in Texas for the family reunion, the brothers were pals again.

  Blanche’s recollection of the fight may have been colored by her equally poor opinion of the rest of the Barrow family’s behavior when she arrived in West Dallas to set up the meeting. Clyde had sent her ahead because, of the four on the run, Blanche was by far the least well known to Sheriff Smoot Schmid and his crew. She was given $400 of the bank’s money along with instructions about where and when everyone would meet, then dropped off at a bus stop. Blanche recalled that she arrived at the Dallas bus station at 5:30 on a Monday morning, meaning the date was probably May 22. She splurged on a cab to take her to Jack Barrow’s house, a curious choice of destination since Jack always tried to keep his distance from the family’s criminal element. He reluctantly let her in, and Blanche called Cumie. When her mother-in-law arrived, Blanche swore to Cumie that she and Buck had no part in shooting the lawmen in Joplin, leaving out the small detail of Buck firing a shotgun during the gun battle. Then she asked Cumie to go tell Emma Parker about the meeting that afternoon. Blanche also asked about W. D. Jones. Cumie said he’d been seen back in West Dallas, but she didn’t know where he was at the moment.

  Blanche next called Nell and Artie Barrow. Her sisters-in-law came by, but only to say they were too busy to attend a family gathering that day. Blanche was indignant that they wouldn’t even take her out to buy some boots beforehand. This is undoubtedly more of Blanche’s embellishing. Nell Barrow remembered that she and Artie “got the clan together” while Blanche ran out to go shopping. Blanche returned not only with impractical riding boots for herself but also skintight “breeches, and very nice and trim she looked in them, too.” Nell wrote that she and Artie did go to the gathering, along with L.C., Marie, and Cumie. Emma Parker went, too, with Bonnie’s sister, Billie Jean. They rendezvoused with Clyde, Bonnie, and Buck on a country road east of Dallas. Blanche thought those three had taken advantage of her absence to do some drinking. Buck, her beloved husband, only took a couple of drinks “because he had promised me he wouldn’t get drunk.” Clyde and Bonnie, according to Blanche, drank too much. The Barrow family accounts of the meeting don’t mention anyone being in bad shape from alcohol.

  But everyone agreed it was an odd gathering, festive and fretful at the same time. Cumie brought red beans, corn bread, and fried chicken, so things began with a picnic. Photos were snapped—having learned a hard lesson with the film left behind in Joplin, Clyde and Bonnie were careful from then on to
cover the license plates with strategically placed coats or hats before posing by their stolen cars. Clyde and Buck gave the other Barrows several hundred silver dollars from the Okabena robbery. Bonnie gave Emma and Billie Jean $112, and Blanche gave Cumie $30 to pass on to her mother. As a birthday gift Clyde gave his sister Marie, who was about to turn fifteen, extra money to buy some nice bedroom furniture.

  Everyone teased Blanche about her tight new pants, and L.C. dared her to race him in her fancy boots. She accepted, and was quickly out of breath. The way the Barrow family would remember it, Blanche was the life of the party. She told funny stories about Bonnie panicking during thunderstorms, and described an argument between Clyde and Bonnie that ended with Bonnie stomping off through a corn field and Clyde dashing down the rows after her, trying to get her to make up. Marie had something more serious to discuss. A teacher at her high school had been harassing her, greeting her “every morning as I entered the school building with the cheery question, ‘Well, have they caught your brothers yet?’” Marie planned to come back to the school after she graduated and “whup her up one side and down the other.”