On Thursday, June 15, the gang reached Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Clyde decided they had gone far enough. They rented two cabins at the Twin Cities Tourist Camp, a relatively plush place. These cabins had indoor plumbing, showers, good mattresses, hot plates, and enclosed garages, which meant their stolen cars could be kept out of sight. Clyde told the camp owners that his wife had been burned when a stove exploded. Then he went to the office of Dr. Walter Eberle and asked him to come inspect his “wife’s” injuries. Clyde was risking his freedom and probably his life by doing this. If Eberle had read the stories about the wreck in Wellington, he might become suspicious and call the local police. Yet Clyde still brought him over to the cabin. After examining Bonnie, Eberle said she had to go to a hospital. When Clyde didn’t agree, the doctor recommended that a nurse at least be hired. A few days later, he made a second visit and the same recommendation.
Besides the murders and thefts he committed, Clyde Barrow routinely exhibited several glaring personality flaws. He became irritated easily and held grudges. He often couldn’t resist calling attention to himself in situations where it endangered not only him but innocent bystanders as well. If he was one of the best drivers anyone had ever seen, he was also one of the most needlessly reckless. Bonnie’s life hung in the balance because Clyde had been driving too fast to notice a detour sign.
But now Clyde demonstrated one of his undeniably good qualities. If someone was loyal to him, Clyde was always loyal in return. Through gun battles, bank robberies, and even a stint in the Kaufman County jail, Bonnie had proven her commitment to him. Only weeks earlier, she’d turned down a plea from her mother to put her own best interests ahead of Clyde’s and leave him. As her condition worsened in Fort Smith, he wanted her to at least have the comfort of another loved one. Around noon on Sunday, June 18, he left Bonnie in the care of Buck, W.D., and Blanche and drove eight hours nonstop to West Dallas. This risk was huge. Sheriff Smoot Schmid and his deputies knew all about the events at Wellington, and realized that if Bonnie really was badly hurt the odds were reasonably good that the Barrow Gang might eventually seek refuge with their families. Dallas County deputy Ted Hinton even visited the Barrows and Emma Parker after hearing the news, mostly as a friendly gesture but undoubtedly to see if there was any sign of Clyde and Bonnie. When he visited Emma Parker, Hinton said later, some of her meaner neighbors had just been assuring her that Clyde would shoot Bonnie and leave her by the side of the road rather than risk his own capture by keeping her with him. Though there wasn’t a stakeout on the Barrow service station or the Parker home, when Clyde arrived in West Dallas around 8 P.M. on June 18, all the Dallas County lawmen were on heightened alert for him.
There’s no record of where, but Clyde, his family, and Emma and Billie Jean Parker met almost immediately. Cumie and Marie Barrow both volunteered to accompany Clyde back to Arkansas, and Emma insisted that she should be the one to go. But Clyde wanted Billie Jean. Bonnie and her sister were close, and Billie Jean had been on the road with them before. He promised Cumie that he’d let her spend a week with them when Bonnie was better.
Around midnight, Ted Hinton drove into West Dallas and passed a car going the other way. He recognized Clyde behind the wheel, and a young woman Hinton didn’t immediately recognize. Clyde had the V-8 gas pedal all the way to the floor, and though Hinton wheeled his own car into a U-turn and attempted pursuit, the deputy couldn’t keep up, even though he claimed later to have prodded his own car up to 80 miles an hour. Hinton stopped and made a call reporting what he’d seen, hoping roadblocks might be set up in time to catch Clyde, but it was too late.
Things hadn’t gone well in Fort Smith while Clyde made his dash to West Dallas for Billie Jean. With Bonnie an invalid, Blanche had to shoulder even more responsibilities, going out daily to get Bonnie’s medicine as well as doing all the cooking and cleaning in the cabin at the Twin Cities Tourist Camp. She took loads of laundry to the cleaners and went shopping for food. All these chores exacerbated her already pronounced tendency to consider herself a martyr. And, clearly, Bonnie felt and acted at her absolute worst. Dr. Eberle apparently wrote a prescription for the narcotic Amytal to dull the pain from her burns and Bonnie quickly developed a dependency on the drug. Whenever it wore off and the pain returned, her temper flared. While Clyde was gone, Bonnie apparently came out of her latest Amytal haze and began quarreling with Buck and Blanche. Buck snapped back at her, which wasn’t like him. The pressure had to be terrible for the happy-go-lucky fellow who only three months earlier had left prison with the intention of never breaking the law again. Besides the constant stress of wondering when the next gun battle might erupt, Buck was also saddled with a wife who liked to complain. Certainly, Blanche had plenty to complain about. If Buck had listened to her, if he hadn’t insisted they go to Joplin to join Clyde and Bonnie for a vacation, they wouldn’t be on the run. Blanche didn’t have to keep reminding her husband of it—Buck often said so himself. He couldn’t help but feel guilty about the mess he’d created for the wife he loved so much. Now, in Fort Smith, when a pain-wracked Bonnie began bickering with Blanche, Buck lost his temper. He told Bonnie that he and Blanche weren’t “practically crazy like you and Clyde.” Bonnie jumped out of bed and screamed that she only wanted W.D. to stay with her until Clyde got back. The sudden movement broke open the scabs on her legs, and her wounds started bleeding again. Clyde and Billie Jean arrived to find Buck and Blanche temporarily estranged from Bonnie, though Blanche was quick to note in her memoir that she kept on cooking meals for everyone and couldn’t understand why Bonnie was being mean: “I had tried to be so good to her.”
Within a few days, the gang needed money again. Bonnie began to show a few signs of improvement—the Unguentine salve had kept the scabs on her legs too soft to heal properly, so Clyde began using another disinfectant. With a lot of encouragement and occasional threats he weaned Bonnie off the Amytal. But he still didn’t want to leave her alone with Billie Jean at the tourist court. He probably feared that the minute he was gone, Bonnie would bully her little sister into giving her Amytal again. So when Clyde decided that more robberies were necessary, he told Buck and W.D. to go out and commit them while he stayed behind with Bonnie, Billie Jean, and Blanche. Because he desperately didn’t want to put Bonnie through the additional stress of a frenzied escape from Fort Smith, Clyde insisted that his brother and W.D. choose only targets well away from the town. He also told them not to try to rob any major businesses like banks. Sticking up a couple of small service stations or grocery stores might keep the gang’s presence in Fort Smith a secret. The last thing they needed were squadrons of Arkansas cops swarming the streets and conducting dragnet searches of the state’s motor courts. Buck had an additional plan. He wanted to steal a big Ford sedan to replace the smaller roadster he had been driving. Then the gang would have two cars with lots of room. After all, counting Billie Jean, there were six of them now. That was fine with Clyde. If there was one criminal act at which the Barrow Gang seemed to excel, it was car theft.
Buck and W.D. left the Twin Cities Tourist Camp around noon on Friday, June 23, driving the Ford V-8 Clyde had stolen in Kansas. Following Clyde’s instructions, they headed north from Fort Smith on Arkansas Highway 71, a two-lane road famous for its steep hills and blind hairpin turns. Their plan was to find stores to rob in Fayetteville, which was sixty miles away. When they arrived in Fayetteville, Buck and W.D. promptly made the amateurish mistake of being too obvious as they strolled around looking for the best prospective store to rob. The owner of one shop even wrote down their physical descriptions and car license number. About 5:30 P.M. they finally picked their target, Brown’s Grocery. Buck parked the Ford V-8 a block away and waited while W.D. stuck a pistol in his pocket and went inside. There were only two people there—Mrs. Brown, the owner, and Ewell Trammell, a youngster who bagged the customers’ purchases in hopes of tips. W.D. brandished his gun, ordered both to stay quiet, and rummaged in the cash drawer. He took about $20 he fou
nd there. W.D. somehow missed the two diamond rings being worn by Mrs. Brown, but he did relieve Ewell of thirty-five cents the youngster had in his pocket. Then, looking outside, W.D. spotted the store’s Model A delivery truck and informed Mrs. Brown that he was going to take it. This made absolutely no sense. The truck would easily be spotted by any pursuing cops, and it couldn’t be driven fast enough to outrun them. But W.D. wanted it, and Mrs. Brown informed him the keys were in the ignition. She chose to let W.D. find out for himself that the battery was dead. W.D. hustled outside, knocking over a small girl as he went to the truck. It wouldn’t start, and instead of giving up, W.D. kept trying, finally getting the engine started by pushing the truck down a hill, jumping back inside and popping the clutch. Having finally succeeded, he apparently decided he didn’t want the truck after all. He drove it back up the hill, parked it, hopped out, and finally rejoined Buck in the Ford. Buck sped off, going south now on Highway 71. But W.D.’s clumsy attempt to steal the Model A truck had left Mrs. Brown time to call the police before he and Buck were clear of Fayetteville. When the cops arrived minutes later, the store owner who’d written down Buck and W.D.’s descriptions and their license plate number was eager to share the information. Phone calls went out to every area police officer, including Marshal Henry Humphrey of Alma, a small town in Crawford County ten miles north of Fort Smith on Highway 71. As it happened, the fifty-one-year-old Humphrey was in the mood to capture some bandits.
Henry Humphrey was popular in his hometown, a hardworking fellow who made his living doing custodial jobs at the high school and farming a small plot with a team of mules because he couldn’t afford horses. Just six weeks earlier, in May 1933, he’d been elected town marshal. The job was essentially that of a night watchman. With only eight hundred residents, Alma couldn’t afford a full-time law officer. Humphrey’s salary for his new position was $15 a month, not enough even in the Depression to let him give up his handyman and farming chores. Not that the extra money didn’t help—though their three children were grown, Humphrey still had a wife to support.
At least the marshal’s job wasn’t supposed to be dangerous, but just the day before Humphrey fielded the call about Buck and W.D. from Fayetteville he had his first run-in with armed bandits. It didn’t go well for the newly elected marshal. While making his rounds about 2 A.M. on June 22, Humphrey was captured by two gunmen who’d taken his pistol and flashlight, tied him up with baling wire, and left him lying helplessly on the floor of the town’s bank while they hauled away its safe. Whoever the thieves might have been, they weren’t members of the Barrow Gang, though it would soon be assumed by local lawmen and citizens that Clyde must have been involved. The safe was eventually discovered in a nearby lake. The crooks had tossed it into the water after they failed to break it open. There was $3,600 still inside when it was retrieved by police. The Barrows weren’t the only incompetent safecrackers around.
So the next afternoon, freshly humiliated by his capture and the theft of his gun, Marshal Humphrey received the call from Fayetteville warning him that two armed thieves apparently were heading south on the road that ran by Alma. Humphrey was given their descriptions and the license number of their car. It was clearly an opportunity for redemption, particularly if these two turned out to be the same ones who’d robbed the Alma bank. Red Salyers, an electrician who doubled as Crawford County deputy sheriff, volunteered to drive Humphrey out to the highway in his maroon Ford. Like most small-town Depression-era lawmen, they brought along their own weapons because no guns were issued to them by their respective departments. Salyers had a seven-shot Winchester rifle that he liked to use for squirrel hunting, and Humphrey carried a .38 revolver he’d borrowed that day from his brother-in-law.
They drove onto Highway 71 and turned north toward Fayetteville, keeping the car windows open because the twilight heat was still over 100 degrees. Some two miles out of Alma they began to descend a steep hill. This was when they passed a blue Chevrolet going the other way. Humphrey and Salyers waved—they both knew Weber Wilson, who worked at a service station run by Humphrey’s son Vernon. There was another car coming up the hill right behind Wilson’s. It was a Ford V-8 sedan with two men in it. Humphrey and Salyers failed to look closely, and so they didn’t see that its license number matched the one they’d been given by the Fayetteville police. Through incredible luck, Buck and W.D. had escaped detection—right until, just over the crest of the very steep hill and driving way too fast like his brother Clyde, Buck crashed the Ford into the back of Wilson’s slower-moving Chevrolet. Fifty yards down the road, Humphrey and Salyers heard the collision and whipped into a U-turn. As they approached the wreck, they saw that Wilson’s car had been knocked upside down in a ditch. The other car involved, the Ford, had its front end bashed in. It was only then that Humphrey noticed that its license number matched the one on the car he’d been warned to watch for. He and Salyers grabbed their weapons and prepared to make an arrest.
Buck and W.D. didn’t wait for Humphrey and Salyers to reach their car. They jumped out, Buck holding a shotgun and W.D. aiming a BAR. With such obviously superior firepower, they could have attempted to take the lawmen hostage. Perhaps they were so badly stunned in the crash that they weren’t thinking straight. But Buck and W.D. had been making terrible decisions all day, and now they made a lethal one. Unlike his younger brother Clyde, Buck Barrow had always been more of a rascal than a rebel. All he ever really wanted out of life were good times and the love of his wife and family. He’d never wanted to be part of a notorious outlaw gang, eternally on the run. Somehow it had just happened. And now it happened that as hardworking, popular Henry Humphrey ran toward him, Buck Barrow pulled the trigger of his shotgun and blew the Alma marshal into the ditch. W.D. was shooting, too. Salyers ducked back behind his car and returned fire. But the Crawford County electrician-deputy was using a rifle whose magazine held just seven relatively low-caliber shots. W.D. had a twenty-round clip in his BAR, and its rounds could punch right through the sides of the car Salyers was using as cover. Salyers was fortunate that W.D. was a terrible marksman—all of his shots missed. While W.D. paused to reload, Salyers sprinted toward a farmhouse about one hundred yards away. Buck didn’t try to bring him down—his shotgun had jammed. When W.D. had another magazine loaded into the BAR, he fired several more times at Salyers. He still didn’t hit him, but the barrage kept Salyers pinned down. That gave W.D. and Buck the opportunity to make a run for the only car on the scene that was still drivable—Salyers’s four-door maroon Ford. As they passed the fallen Humphrey, one of them reached down and took the .38 that the marshal had borrowed from his brother-in-law. Seeing that the gunmen were trying to escape, Salyers fired several shots. He was more accurate than W.D. One of his bullets smashed the horn button on the Ford’s steering wheel. Another clipped off two of W.D.’s fingertips. As Salyers watched, and as Wilson cautiously emerged from the ditch where he’d wisely ducked when all the shooting started, Buck wheeled the Ford a few hundred yards back north on Highway 71, then steered west on a smaller road. As he did, someone in the car—probably W.D. if his wounded hand allowed it, since Buck was driving—fired at B. C. Ames, a motorist who was driving by. Ames wasn’t hit, and volunteered to drive the gravely wounded Marshal Humphrey to the nearest hospital in the town of Van Buren while Salyers found a phone to report the gunfight to area lawmen. Humphrey lived through the weekend, but died of his wounds on Monday.
By then, Crawford County sheriff Albert Maxey had another charge besides murder and theft to add against the two fugitives he’d erroneously identified as both of the notorious Barrow brothers. A Mrs. Rogers, who lived in the hills above Highway 71, claimed that Clyde and Buck appeared at her door and raped her shortly after the Alma gunfight. They hadn’t. Clyde was back in Fort Smith with Bonnie, Blanche, and Billie Jean. Buck, fleeing with W.D., was far too preoccupied with flight to have time or interest in rape, and anyway sexual assault was never a crime committed by any members of the Barrow Gang. Two oth
er men raped Mrs. Rogers, but that fact wouldn’t be confirmed by police until weeks later when it became obvious that Clyde and Buck couldn’t have been anywhere near her home at the time she was attacked. But by then the story of the supposed assault had been widely disseminated, taken as fact in newspaper stories and emblazoned on post office bulletin boards and telephone poles in the form of prominent WANTED for Murder and Rape posters pinned up by the Crawford County Sheriff’s Department.
Rather than stalking sexual prey, immediately after the shootout Buck and W.D. careened down backcountry roads in Deputy Salyers’s stolen Ford, well aware that every lawman in the region would soon be on the lookout for them. W.D. sniveled at the slightest provocation, so it’s reasonable to imagine him in hysterics at the sight of his two mangled fingers. Buck believed he’d just killed someone—other members of the Barrow family would later claim W.D. told them he shot Humphrey, but from the moment he pulled the trigger of his shotgun Buck had no doubt that he was the one who murdered the marshal. So, undoubtedly panic-stricken, the two outlaws drove west while Deputy Salyers made his calls and a massive regional manhunt began to be organized.
Buck and W.D. wanted desperately to get back to the motor court in Alma. Three miles east of Van Buren they spotted a married couple, later identified as the Loftons, driving by in a car whose make apparently was never noted. Eager to ditch Salyers’s telltale maroon Ford, Buck and W.D. stopped the Loftons at gunpoint and commandeered their vehicle. The fugitives got within a few miles of the motor court, but word about them had spread and a bridge they had to drive across to get there was blocked. So Buck and W.D. abandoned the Loftons’ car and sneaked back into Fort Smith on foot. It was just after 10 P.M. when they staggered into the cabin and poured out their awful story to Clyde, Bonnie, Blanche, and Billie Jean.
Jeff Guinn Page 24