There was no time for recriminations. Clyde quickly organized the gang’s escape. The only car left to them, the relatively tiny Ford coupé, couldn’t carry all six at once along with their suitcases and guns. Clyde told Buck and W.D. to start packing up. He’d take the women in the car, drop them off at a safe camping spot out in the country, and then come back for the other two and the luggage. Buck was in a terrible emotional state. He clung to Blanche and cried that now he had murder on his soul. Billie Jean Parker pointed out that her sister would need to lie down in the woods, so they had to bring bedding. Clyde stripped the blankets and sheets off a bed in the cabin. The owners of the camp had been kind to them—their daughter volunteered a few times to nurse Bonnie—and he didn’t want to steal their property, so he left $10 on a chest of drawers in payment. Then he drove Bonnie, Billie Jean, and Blanche out of town and into a wooded area where he thought they would be safe until morning.
When Clyde drove away, Blanche and Billie Jean used the blankets and sheets to fix up a place for Bonnie. After they got her settled, they sat beside her to wait until the men returned. It was very dark, but they didn’t dare light even a match. Blanche was terrified for Buck. Billie Jean had just begun a convenient romance with W.D., so she was concerned about his injured fingers. They tried to brush away mosquitoes and other bugs until Clyde, Buck, and W.D. finally drove up, still in the Ford coupé. They hadn’t been able to find a bigger car to steal, and they wanted to be gone before daylight. The manhunt would certainly reach Fort Smith then. All six of them crammed into the car, and Clyde drove into the Ozark Mountains.
Once again someone was dead, and the Barrow Gang was on the run with no plan beyond trying to survive for another day.
CHAPTER 18
The Last Interlude
On Monday, June 26, Dr. Julian Fields of Enid, Oklahoma, made the mistake of leaving his medical bag in the Ford V-8 he had parked in a hospital lot. When he returned, the car was gone. It turned up the next day outside the north-central Oklahoma town, but the medical bag was missing. The bag was packed with syringes, morphine, and various sulfates, just what was needed to treat the wounds of a badly burned woman. Clearly, Clyde’s main priority on fleeing Arkansas was to ensure that Bonnie at least had the medication she needed. They could no longer hope to rely on the discretion of a doctor. Thanks to the wanted posters widely circulated by Crawford County sheriff Albert Maxey, lawmen in all of Arkansas’s neighboring states soon knew that Bonnie Parker of the Barrow Gang was badly injured. Maxey’s wanted poster urged his fellow lawmen to “inquire of your doctors if they have been called to treat a woman that has been burned in a car wreck.” Bonnie needed long-term bed rest, not daily jouncing as Clyde drove hundreds of miles over rough roads, but the gang had to stay on the move. At least morphine to dull the pain and sulfates to treat her burns could make her marginally comfortable.
And Bonnie’s health was only one of several pressing problems. Buck and W.D. had abandoned most of the gang’s arsenal during their flight from Alma to the motor court in Fort Smith. If they were going to be in a position to outfight pursuers, they needed guns again, preferably BARs, and those were only to be had from a National Guard armory. Then there was Billie Jean Parker: clearly, they had to get her back to West Dallas. They had never intended for her to become a permanent part of the gang. But Clyde couldn’t risk driving her home himself. After Alma, every lawman in Texas was on heightened alert for the Barrow boys. There was a lot of money in it for them. In Crawford County, Sheriff Maxey was offering an especially generous reward—$250 each—and Maxey wasn’t even basing payment on their eventual conviction for the murder of Marshal Henry Humphrey. All anyone had to do to get the money was capture and hold Clyde and Buck until Maxey came for them. The danger of arrest was especially great in West Dallas, where Ted Hinton had been regularly dropping by the Barrow family service station. Clyde and Buck, he believed, would inevitably show up soon. Cumie made Hinton her occasional confidant. She didn’t betray Clyde and Buck in any way, but she was resigned enough to tell Sheriff Smoot Schmid’s deputy that her sons, along with Bonnie and Blanche, were living on borrowed time. On another occasion, Cumie, who surely considered self-pity to be an egregious sin, couldn’t help complaining to Hinton about “the troubles I’ve seen.”
But Clyde was grateful to Billie Jean for risking her own safety to help nurse her sister. He was determined that she get home. After stealing a bigger car, he took Billie Jean just over the Texas state line into the town of Sherman, where he bought her a new dress and put her on a train back to Dallas. Then Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, Blanche, and W.D. drove, traveling long stretches of isolated country, trying not to attract police attention. Blanche wrote later that they ranged as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, where they spent the Fourth of July. On the night of July 7, they were back in Oklahoma, staying at a tourist camp thirty-five miles from Enid. Not long after they checked in, Clyde and Buck left W.D. in a cabin with Bonnie and Blanche. The Barrow brothers returned about 4 A.M. with what Blanche recalled as “more guns and ammunition than I had ever seen at one time in my whole life.” They’d hit the National Guard armory on the campus of Phillips University in Enid, and the haul of BARs and pistols was so grand that Clyde later told his mother that there were “so many guns [he] didn’t know what to do with them.” They tried to stack the new arsenal in the cabin’s bathtub, but there were too many weapons for all of them to fit. The take also included ammunition and a pair of powerful binoculars. Once again properly armed, the gang camped out in the country for the next few days. The three men spent part of each day target shooting. At night, Clyde was concerned enough about pursuit to insist that someone stand watch until dawn. Blanche wrote that she usually drew guard duty. She’d perch all night on the roof of their car to get better sight angles, and use the binoculars stolen from the Enid armory to scan roads and the surrounding countryside. Blanche had trouble staying awake, so she would periodically wash her face with rubbing alcohol. She never saw anything alarming.
Around the second week in July, the gang moved on to remote areas of Kansas and Iowa. In a series of postcards to West Dallas, they assured the Barrows and Parkers that “Sis” was getting better. She was, but not enough. Though Bonnie’s burns were healing, the battery acid had permanently damaged her right leg. In the clumsy but descriptive words of her sister Billie Jean, Bonnie “never walked any more straight.” Perhaps if she’d been admitted to a hospital and under a doctor’s care, that wouldn’t have been the case. But because the tendons and ligaments in her injured knee and ankle tightened as they mended without benefit of daily therapy, the damaged leg “was drawn up” and Bonnie could not straighten it for any extended length of time, or even put much weight on it. For the rest of her life, whenever she had to move on her own, she usually hopped rather than walked. Clyde often carried her. Sometimes, W. D. Jones said later, either he or Clyde “had to carry her to the toilet and take her off when she was finished.” For a lifelong flirt like Bonnie who always wanted to appear alluring, that must have been the ultimate degradation.
And yet Bonnie stayed with Clyde. There has never been any suggestion that she wanted to leave him after becoming crippled. If ever Bonnie had the opportunity to go home and avoid prison, this was it. Particularly in Texas, most juries would surely have believed she’d been punished enough. Bonnie probably didn’t realize just how seriously she’d been hurt. Perhaps she thought her leg would heal to the point where she would eventually walk normally again. That never happened.
Still, if Bonnie wasn’t all the way back to normal, at least Clyde and the others no longer feared she might die from her original injuries or subsequent infection. They had good guns again. It was time to get back in the game, to rob a few grocery stores or service stations, put together traveling money, and perhaps make a quick trip back to West Dallas. Except for Clyde’s emergency visit to fetch Billie Jean shortly after the Wellington wreck, they hadn’t seen their families since late May. So on July
18, the five of them showed up in Fort Dodge, Iowa, with Clyde behind the wheel of a 1929 Chevrolet. Apparently they hadn’t come across any new, unattended Ford V-8s recently. In rapid succession they robbed three service stations. It all took about ten minutes. At the last station, they took the attendant’s car keys so he couldn’t follow them. He asked if they’d at least toss the keys out on the road after a few blocks—he didn’t want to have to get another set. They obliged. Local newspapers later estimated the gang’s take at between $125 and $150.
From Fort Dodge, Clyde drove south. At some point he found a Ford V-8 to steal and abandoned the Chevrolet. By 6 P.M. they had covered 250 miles and were approaching Kansas City. Buck didn’t want to stop for the night near such a major town. He warned Clyde that the big-city cops might be on the lookout for other crooks and “we would run right into their heat without knowing it.” But Clyde wasn’t in the mood to listen. He and Buck had spent some of the ride arguing, and he probably didn’t want the others to think his big brother could tell him what to do. Besides, long rides still bothered Bonnie. She’d be better off if they spent the night at a decent motor court. They had money from the three service station robberies in Fort Dodge—he’d find a nice place and they’d stop, even if Buck didn’t like it.
About twenty miles out of Kansas City they reached the suburb of Platte City, Missouri, at the intersection of Highways 71 and 59. There was an interesting conglomeration of buildings there—a combination service station/café/grocery store called Slim’s Castle, a restaurant/ball-room named the Red Crown Tavern, and a stand-alone, two-cabin motor court with the cabins attached to opposite sides of a closed garage. Slim’s Castle was across the street from the Red Crown Tavern and the cabins. In all, it was rather upscale, and exactly the kind of place the gang usually avoided. For one thing, it was much too close to Kansas City and its legions of cops. Police in Kansas City had been on high alert since June 17. That was when a gang of mobsters supposedly led by Pretty Boy Floyd brazenly stormed Kansas City’s downtown Union Station to rescue bandit Frank Nash from police and federal agents as they attempted to take him to Leavenworth prison by train. Three local policemen, a federal agent, and Nash died, but the gunmen escaped. “The Kansas City Massacre” had quickly become one of the most famous shootouts in modern crime annals, and local cops did not plan to be caught off-guard again.
Another problem with the Barrow Gang staying at the Red Crown was that they would be occupying the only two tourist cabins there. That meant they wouldn’t be able to blend in with other guests and their cars. But Clyde, still stinging from his squabble with Buck, was more interested in proving who was boss than in exercising caution. He pulled up at Slim’s Castle and asked the gas pump attendant who he had to talk to in order to rent the cabins across the street. After learning they were operated by the Red Crown Tavern, Clyde drove a short distance down a side road, then parked. Buck and W.D. curled up on the floor of the Ford and were covered with blankets. Just in case anyone in Platte City was on the lookout for the five-member Barrow Gang, Clyde intended to present himself at the Red Crown as a man traveling with his wife and mother-in-law, the latter undoubtedly a dig at Blanche. So W.D. and Buck were concealed and Blanche moved into the front seat with Clyde and Bonnie.
They didn’t know it, but these would be their last moments of relative good luck. Polled on the spot, all of them might have sworn they were barely surviving the most terrible of times. Clyde and Buck were wanted for murder. Bonnie was newly crippled. Blanche hated being on the run, and W.D. had been shot twice, in Joplin and outside of Alma. They often slept out in the open, they rarely had much money, and they were in constant danger of being arrested or gunned down.
But they were also feared, which pleased Clyde, and famous, which was something Bonnie had always wanted. They were their own bosses. They wore nice clothes and drove only the best cars. Despite Bonnie’s terrible burns and W.D.’s injuries, they still must have felt a certain sense of invulnerability. In every showdown with “the laws,” they had won the fight. Other people died, not them. The Barrow Gang always escaped. For all the times they told their families they accepted the inevitability of a terrible end someday, Clyde was still only twenty-three and Bonnie twenty-two, ages when even under the direst circumstances “someday” seems very far away. Their fatalism was tempered by their youth.
So was their perspective about why they were still alive and at large. They didn’t realize that they’d been lucky in two critical ways. First, though the Barrow Gang had committed dozens of well-publicized crimes since March 1932, they had never been the target of any organized pursuit. Authorities in individual jurisdictions hoped to nab Clyde, Bonnie, and their companions if they showed up in their town or county or state. But a travel/crime pattern was starting to emerge: Texas to Oklahoma to Missouri to Arkansas, though not always in the same order and sometimes with other states like Iowa, Kansas, and Louisiana thrown in. Lawmen were beginning to notice.
On July 18, the same day that the Barrow Gang robbed three service stations in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and made its way to Platte City, Missouri, Joplin chief of detectives Ed Portley sent a letter to his counterparts in Van Buren, Hillsboro, Atoka, Sherman, Lufkin, Wellington, Waco, Abilene, and Dallas. Though coordinated pursuit of criminals was practically unheard of on an interstate basis between county and city lawmen, Portley proposed an alliance “among those who are most interested in [the] arrest and conviction” of the Barrows. His letter asked each sheriff or police chief to share information about “any associates or hang outs that [the Barrow Gang] may have…we believe that something special should be done to secure the capture of these murderers.” Portley’s proposal came to nothing, but it was the first attempt to hunt Clyde and Bonnie in a pragmatic, cooperative way. There would soon be others.
The second way in which the gang had been lucky was that they had always been opposed by local lawmen who had no idea they were taking on the Barrows. The poorly armed cops expected to confront small-timers whose firepower was equally limited. That gave Clyde and his cronies a tremendous advantage. The gang had yet to experience a coordinated assault by well-prepared, well-armed officers aware of exactly who they were up against.
Then after dark on July 18, 1933, Clyde drove back to the Red Crown Tavern in Platte City, and all that changed.
CHAPTER 19
The Platte City Shootout
N. D. Houser, the owner-operator of the Red Crown Tavern and its adjoining two-cabin motor court, was suspicious from the moment Blanche Barrow walked into his office on July 18 and asked to rent the cabins overnight for a party of three. For one thing, Blanche was wearing her beloved “riding breeches”—jodhpurs was the correct fashion term—that were skintight across the rear and flared out from the hip to the knee. Pants like that were seldom seen in Platte City, Missouri, and several people who saw Blanche there were still remarking about them decades later. Then she paid the $4 rent in loose change, undoubtedly looted earlier in the day from the cash registers and gum machines at the three service stations in Fort Dodge. Houser took the money and watched as the fellow driving the Ford V-8 pulled up to the cabins, opened the door of the garage between them, and backed his car in. Criminals were notorious for doing that so they could make fast getaways.
Clyde got Bonnie settled in the right-hand cabin. W. D. Jones joined them there as usual. Buck and Blanche took the cabin on the left. Almost as soon as everyone was inside, Clyde sent for Blanche. He gave her more loose change and told her to go over to the tavern and buy five dinners and beer. She was to bring the food back so they could eat in the cabins. Blanche reminded Clyde that they’d just checked in as a party of three. Buying five meals would be a tip-off that there were more of them than that. But Clyde said he didn’t care—she was to get five dinners, period, and he wanted chicken if they had it. Blanche did as she was told, and as she poured more coins into his palm Houser said he’d have to go back to the cabins with her. He’d forgotten to take down the license
number of their car, and it was required information from all their guests. Feeling helpless, Blanche led him back to the right-hand cabin and called for Clyde to come out. He opened the garage door so Houser could jot down the V-8 sedan’s license number: Oklahoma 75-782. Clyde didn’t think it was an immediate problem as he routinely switched plates on stolen cars. But it should have served as a warning sign that the staff at the Red Crown was especially vigilant. Clyde apparently didn’t care. He told his family later that he liked the Red Crown cabins. They had stone and brick walls, which made him feel secure. If they needed to get to their car in a hurry, there was an interior door in Clyde’s cabin that opened directly into the garage. Buck and Blanche’s cabin didn’t have one. They could only go in and out through the front door.
After dinner, everyone went to bed. They slept late on the morning of July 19. When Buck woke up, he told Blanche to go over to the other cabin and see when Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. would be ready to leave. Clyde said he’d decided they would stay another day. He wanted Blanche to fetch some more food and beer. Clyde felt relaxed about their situation. The cabins were nice. Bonnie needed rest. So Clyde gave Blanche yet another pile of change. After she brought the food, he sent her out to pay Houser $4 for a second night’s stay. Blanche wasn’t exaggerating in her memoir when she complained about having to run all the gang’s errands. Houser took the money and told Blanche she could have a refund if her group decided to leave before nightfall. She thought it was an odd remark, and told Clyde that Houser “was the type that might tell the law we were there if he had the slightest suspicion about us.” He was, and he didn’t have to go far to do it.
Jeff Guinn Page 25