Clyde asked about W.D. He really wanted the boy back in the gang. Then he asked his mother to contact the Joplin police and request that they send his guitar back to West Dallas. (She did, but was turned down.) The four fugitives gave their version of the Stone-Darby kidnapping—they just wanted “a lark”—and told about the bank robberies in Lucerne and Okabena. Bonnie explained that she hadn’t shot the man who jumped on the hood of their car in Lucerne because he had white hair. Then she said she liked the nice blue outfit Marie was wearing. They were the same size, and Marie was feeling generous. So Bonnie and the younger girl retired to “a discreet place out of sight” and swapped clothes.
Then Emma Parker asked Bonnie to walk down the road with her so they could talk privately. The Barrows knew Emma was trying to convince her daughter to leave Clyde and surrender to the police. Emma’s argument to her daughter was that all Bonnie would face was a prison sentence, if there was any jail time at all—the Kaufman County jury had already let her go, and maybe another jury would do the same. Bonnie refused. She told her mother that it was inevitable that Clyde would die and, when he did, she wanted to die with him. For a change, she was matter-of-fact instead of dramatic.
While Emma was failing to persuade Bonnie to surrender, Cumie had no better luck with Buck. He told his mother that he and Blanche would stay with Clyde and Bonnie, “the four of us together ’til they get us, I guess.” Then there were extended goodbyes, and promises from the fugitives that they’d be back in touch soon.
With money in their pockets, the Barrow Gang felt ready for another vacation, this one in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. As soon as they could after crossing the Texas state line, they stole a second car so Buck and Clyde wouldn’t have to ride together all the time. Bonnie’s younger sister, Billie Jean, apparently came along part of the way and later talked about Clyde and Buck joking together, so the additional space had its intended effect.
For about ten days they made their leisurely way along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast, taking time to stop and swim and sun themselves on the beach. Blanche posed for one provocative picture modeling racy swimwear and another lounging pinup style on the sand. There were a few close calls with cops, but nothing that involved shooting. At some point they received interesting news. On June 2, a jury finally passed sentence on Raymond Hamilton for the murder of J. N. Bucher in Hillsboro. Raymond avoided the death penalty but was given ninety-nine years in prison. Tacked onto other sentences he’d received for various car thefts and bank robberies, his cumulative sentence totaled 263 years. Oklahoma officials demonstrated no interest in extraditing Raymond so he could be tried for the murder of Eugene Moore in Stringtown. So Raymond was immediately hauled off to Eastham Prison Farm by Bud Russell and the One Way Wagon. Since Raymond wasn’t facing an imminent date with the electric chair, Clyde probably felt no immediate obligation to free him. He was only going to make a rescue attempt out of duty rather than friendship. If Raymond had to spend some months or even years sweating out in Eastham’s cotton fields before Clyde got around to breaking him out, so what? Besides, it would take more Barrow Gang members than the current lineup to pull off a raid on Eastham, and right now they were on vacation with no time for recruitment. (Hearing that Raymond received a ninety-nine-year sentence rather than the death penalty must have been a real relief to Clyde’s former partner, Lake Dallas Gang member Ted Rogers, who’d actually shot John Bucher. Already in prison in Huntsville on an unrelated conviction, Rogers had promised other inmates to come forward and admit he was Bucher’s killer if Raymond was sentenced to death. But since Raymond had avoided the electric chair, there was no reason for Rogers to do so. Even without the additional ninety-nine years assessed by the Hillsboro jury, Raymond’s other convictions still were the equivalent of a life sentence.)
During their coastal trip, Clyde and Buck apparently had only one disagreement—Clyde wanted W.D. back in the gang, and Buck thought the teenager would either do something stupid and get himself killed, or else get picked up by the cops and tell them enough to get the rest of the gang caught, too. Clyde was adamant, and contacted Cumie. She was instructed to find W.D. and tell him Clyde and Bonnie would come to West Dallas shortly to pick him up. While they made that trip, Buck and Blanche could take the second car and go visit her father in Good-water, Oklahoma. Then late on the night of June 10, they’d reunite with Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. on a bridge between the southwest Oklahoma towns of Erick and Sayre.
Blanche hadn’t seen her father for some time. Their reunion was tearful on both sides. Matt Caldwell said he’d read stories about what had happened in Joplin and couldn’t believe his baby girl was involved in such a terrible thing. Blanche cried and told him that she and Buck were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Blanche may have believed it herself, even though she was wearing spiffy riding boots she’d paid for with stolen money.
Meanwhile, Clyde and Bonnie drove back to West Dallas, where they picked up W.D. and headed out into West Texas on a roundabout route to the rendezvous point in Oklahoma. They probably spent the night of June 8 at a motor court in Vernon, Texas, and June 9 found them in the small West Texas town of Wellington. The cotton-farming community had been hit hard by the Depression, and the arrival of three well-dressed strangers in a flashy Ford V-8 caused a stir. Clyde and Bonnie surely didn’t mind. It didn’t seem as though anyone recognized them and, if necessary, they always felt certain they could outrun or outfight any backcountry cops. There was no reason not to stay a little while. They had time to kill before meeting Buck and Blanche late on the 10th. Soon after Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. arrived in town and checked into its small hotel—this far from any big city, it was the equivalent of a convenient motor court—several employees at a nearby garage wandered over to inspect the V-8 Ford the strangers had parked in the street. They were impressed.
The V-8 wasn’t as impressive the next morning when the garage mechanics saw it again. The Ford was now a battered wreck resting on its side in the Salt Fork branch of the Red River just outside of town. Clyde’s reckless driving had finally cost the gang dearly, and Bonnie most of all.
CHAPTER 17
Disaster in Wellington, Murder in Arkansas
The terrain around the small West Texas town of Wellington is so flat that it defies the concept of distance. There aren’t many hills or, except for a few wooded areas, trees. Brush is low-slung, prickly, and just a slightly darker shade of brown than the dirt stretching to the horizon. Whenever there has been enough rain to produce standing water, sluggish rivers and streams trickle in wide cuts often ten or twelve feet deep, evidence of some prehistoric underground upheaval that left cracks on the earth’s barren crust above. Because it’s cotton country, during the hot months when bolls bloom and are picked, clouds of dirty cotton fluff float free and get tangled on brush and the shoulders of roads. This gives the unsettling impression of recent light snowfall on days when temperatures routinely reach 100 degrees or more. Sometimes depth perception is difficult even in broad daylight. At night, it’s practically nonexistent. Locals understand the necessity of driving with care.
On the night of June 10, 1933, Sam and Sallie Pritchard had their extended family over for a visit. The Pritchard house was a few miles north of Wellington and about one hundred yards from the Salt Fork branch of the Red River and two parallel roads running north–south. One road was new and freshly paved. The other was older and consisted of packed dirt. The county was building a bridge over the river on the new road, so there was a detour sign on both sides ordering motorists to switch over to the old road and its bridge. The Salt Fork actually had very little water in it, but the cut of the river was deep, probably twelve feet. Some later estimates by reporters made it closer to thirty. The Pritchards’ guests at their house by the Salt Fork that night included their son Jack, daughter Gladys, daughter-in-law Irene, son-in-law Alonzo Cartwright, and Alonzo and Gladys’s baby, whose name and gender no one seems to remember now. Jack wanted to talk about the p
ossibility of everybody moving to Arkansas—he thought things were pretty well played out around Wellington. Jack and his wife were especially poor. They couldn’t afford a car and had to ride horses to the house that evening. After a while the family made ice cream, and around 10 P.M. Sam and Jack took their bowls outside and sat on the porch, eating and talking. Suddenly they heard the thrum of a powerful car engine clearly roaring north at high speed. Jack told his father that the driver must be a darn fool.
The darn fool was Clyde, driving 70 miles an hour on a pitch-black night when it was hard to see much of what was coming up on the road. Bonnie sat in the front seat with him. W.D. was in back. Clyde raced right past the detour sign and, seconds later, the road ended and the Ford V-8 blasted through a wooden barricade and flew into the air. It spun on the way down, made metal-rending contact with the hard rock of the riverbed and rolled over several times before coming to a stop on its side, facing back south the way it had come. Sam, Jack, and Alonzo sprinted over, and Jack recalled forty-seven years later that the V-8 had its “doors jammed and the glasses [windows] broked out.” A pair of arms was reaching up through where the windshield used to be. Alonzo grabbed them, and Jack helped him pull Clyde from the wreck. Then they hauled out W.D., and Alonzo yelled to Jack that he thought there was “a kid or something down here in the bottom” of the Ford.
Though some later accounts claimed the V-8 burst into flames, causing Bonnie’s terrible injuries, that didn’t happen. Her right leg was coated with acid spurting from the car’s smashed battery. The scalding was instant and ferocious—W. D. Jones said later that “the hide on her right leg was gone, from her hip down to the ankle. I could see the bone at places.” As Jack and Alonzo lifted her out, they thought she was having trouble breathing. Clyde and W.D. were dazed, so Jack carried Bonnie to the Pritchard house, recalling later that even though she was so tiny she was still “all limber and kinda hard to carry,” meaning she probably had passed out from the pain. Bonnie was laid down carefully on a bed, and Sallie Pritchard and her daughter Gladys began swabbing her wounds with baking soda and yellow Cloverine Salve. Putting baking soda on burns was a popular country home remedy—in this case, it kept the battery acid from eating into Bonnie’s leg any further. With that done, Sallie Pritchard told Clyde it was time to get a doctor. According to Jack Pritchard, Clyde refused, adding, “If she dies, she will just have to die.” During the next few days, Clyde demonstrated that the last thing he wanted Bonnie to do was die. He took extraordinary personal risks to save her life. If, in those first terrible moments in the Pritchards’ house, he did say something so callous, it was probably because he’d also been battered around in the wreck. Jack Pritchard said Clyde was “skinned up a little,” too. He was still trying to gather his wits about him.
Clyde’s immediate instinct was to prepare to fight. He told W.D. to stay at the house while he went back to the wreck to salvage some of the gang’s guns. The family saw what he was doing and became suspicious. When Bonnie regained consciousness and distracted W.D. by calling out to him, Alonzo Cartwright sneaked away in his father-in-law’s old Dodge. He drove into Wellington and alerted Collingsworth County sheriff George Corry and town chief of police Paul Hardy. After requesting an ambulance, they jumped into a Chevrolet and drove off to the Pritchard place. Alonzo had trouble getting the Dodge started again and lagged behind.
Corry and Hardy certainly had no idea they were about to confront the notorious Clyde Barrow. Based on Alonzo Cartwright’s description, they figured the accident victims were local kids who’d been out drinking, and who maybe “carried a gun or two for a thrill.” When they arrived at the Pritchard house and went in, they had trouble seeing much. The only illumination was from a kerosene lamp. Then Clyde emerged from the shadows, brandishing a BAR. He took Corry and Hardy prisoner, and Bonnie managed to stagger off her bed and grab the lawmen’s guns. W. D. Jones, toting a shotgun, came inside and told Hardy, “You boys are just in time. We want to borrow your car.”
Amid all the confusion, Gladys Pritchard Cartwright worried that her baby, who’d begun crawling, might get out the back door in the kitchen. Picking up the child, she went into the kitchen and reached to close the door latch. W.D. thought she was reaching for a weapon and fired a blast from his shotgun. Subsequent Barrow Gang lore frequently described the woman’s fingers or even hand being blown completely off, but Gladys actually was much more fortunate. W.D. was still reeling from the crash, and his aim was off. A few stray pellets nicked one of Gladys’s fingers, inflicting the most superficial of wounds. The baby’s scalp was slightly scratched from bits of window screen from the door absorbing most of W.D.’s blast. But the near-miss unsettled everyone, and Clyde decided it was time to clear out and meet Buck and Blanche in Oklahoma. He had no intention of leaving the lawmen behind to organize pursuit. For the moment, they undoubtedly made useful hostages, bargaining chips if the gang was cornered. So Corry and Hardy were prodded into the back seat of their Chevrolet. Clyde got behind the wheel, Bonnie was settled in beside him, and W.D. climbed in the front seat, too, twisting around so he could hold the prisoners at gunpoint.
After driving only a few miles, Clyde pulled over and placed Bonnie in the back seat with Corry and Hardy. She lay across their laps, and they tried to cradle her as the car bumped along the rough country road. Hardy was impressed with Clyde’s driving. He’d stopped racing along at foolhardy speeds, dropping back to what the Wellington police chief estimated at 50 to 60 miles an hour. Whenever Clyde passed a car coming the other way, he steered slightly toward the center of the road, forcing the other driver to inch close to the ditch and concentrate on not running off the road. That, Hardy believed, was Clyde’s clever way of preventing the other motorist from getting a good look at the stolen Chevrolet.
At some point, Clyde had a terrible lapse in judgment. Still shaken from the crash, worried about Bonnie, he couldn’t resist asking his prisoners if they’d heard of the Barrow brothers. Hardy and Corry both had, but they played dumb “to string them along.” Finally Hardy said he thought he’d heard of Buck Barrow, but not anybody named Clyde. At that point, Clyde knew he’d been fooled, and couldn’t help laughing. What he didn’t realize was that now Corry and Hardy not only knew that they were prisoners of the Barrow Gang, they also realized the notorious Bonnie Parker was seriously hurt. Somewhere, somehow, Clyde might try to get her medical attention, and that clue could help pursuers track him down.
It was well after midnight when Clyde finally guided the Chevrolet over the bridge at the designated meeting place in Oklahoma between Erick and Sayre. Buck and Blanche were asleep in their car—Clyde had to honk the Chevrolet’s horn to wake them. Clyde told them there had been a wreck, Bonnie might be dying, and there were two lawmen to get rid of. When Bonnie was carried over to Buck’s car, Blanche, taking in her terribly burned leg along with a profusion of cuts on her face and arms, thought “she would die before daybreak.” Clyde’s nose appeared broken, and W.D. had a few burns, too.
Once Bonnie was settled on a pile of clothes in the back seat of his brother’s car, Clyde had to decide what to do with Corry and Hardy. Buck asked if he planned “to bump them off.” Clyde asked the prisoners what they’d do if he set them free. Hardy promised they’d just try to get back home, and Clyde replied that they’d probably run to the nearest phone. But he was touched by how gentle they had been with Bonnie after she’d been placed across their laps in the back seat. He remarked to Buck that “I’ve been with them so long, I’m beginning to like them,” then told his brother and W.D. to tie the lawmen to trees by the side of the road. They didn’t have any rope, so they used Corry’s and Hardy’s own handcuffs, plus lengths of barbed wire they pulled from a fence. Afterward when they told Clyde about using the barbed wire, he was angry with them. Because of the lawmen’s kindness to Bonnie, he hadn’t wanted them to suffer in any way.
After a half-hour, Corry was able to work his way free. The lawmen found their Chevrolet abandoned not far d
own the road, and drove back to Wellington in it. They told their story and bulletins went out—the Barrow Gang was traveling with a badly wounded member, Bonnie Parker. Lawmen should be alert for strangers seeking medical attention for a young woman with a horribly burned leg.
Wellington residents trooped out to the crash site, hunting for souvenirs. Today, visitors to the Collingsworth County Museum can still see two ammunition clips for Clyde’s BAR and a pair of Bonnie’s gloves. She had very tiny hands. The Ford V-8 was pulled out of the creek bed and hauled back to the town garage. The mechanics there rebuilt and sold it. The Wellington Leader proved itself just as capable of Barrow-related exaggeration as any big-city newspaper, noting in a front-page story that Gladys Cartwright’s barely nicked thumb “might have to be amputated.” Some of the men in town got a posse together and set out roadblocks, but by then the battered Barrow Gang was long gone—though not as long gone as usual.
For the next three days, Clyde worked his way through Oklahoma and Kansas. With Bonnie in such terrible condition, he couldn’t embark on one of his thousand-miles-at-a-time driving marathons. Her wounds needed frequent treatment, and Clyde didn’t dare consult a doctor until enough time had passed for talk about the Wellington crash to die down a little. So the gang made its relatively painstaking way east. They’d quickly abandoned the Chevrolet belonging to Corry and Hardy, knowing that cops everywhere would be on the lookout for it. Clyde stole a new Ford V-8 in Hutchinson, Kansas, so the gang had two cars now, including the Ford coupé Buck was driving. Each day when they stopped, Blanche was dispatched to some small-town drugstore to buy Unguentine salve and bandages, and they’d treat Bonnie’s burned leg. The pain prevented her from sleeping. She’d start to doze and then wake up “groaning with pain.” The first nights they pulled off the road and slept in their cars. In Pratt, Kansas, they risked staying overnight in a tourist court, taking only one cabin so the owners wouldn’t suspect there were five of them. Money was running out, and Buck and W.D. went out to pull a few quick robberies. Clyde wouldn’t leave Bonnie’s side.
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