Now on Friday, July 21, he went into the Myron Williams Clothing Shop while Bonnie waited in the V-8, undoubtedly acting as a lookout. Clyde bought several shirts from clerk John Love, not noticing until he paid for his purchases that a gold badge gleamed inside Love’s shirt pocket. Love served as Dexter’s night marshal. Clyde got out of the store fast. Love didn’t notice much about his customer besides that the fellow was short and walked with a slight limp. From there, Clyde went to Blohm’s Restaurant, where he ordered five dinners to go and a block of ice, the latter to chip and apply to Buck’s head wound in an effort to reduce the swelling of his brain. While the food was being prepared, he visited Pohle’s Pharmacy and purchased bandages, burn salve, and hydrogen peroxide. The purchases weren’t unusual. Lots of people couldn’t afford doctor’s fees and tried to treat even severe injuries themselves. Back at the restaurant, Clyde asked for plates as well as the food. He promised he’d bring the plates back the next day. Again, the request wasn’t out of the ordinary. Dexter was a small, friendly town. If some stranger politely asked for dinnerware and said he’d return it, there was no reason not to believe him.
Clyde made another food run to Dexter on Saturday, returning the used plates to the restaurant and taking back new ones along with fried chicken dinners. Buck, somehow still hanging on, had mentioned he thought he would like fried chicken. They didn’t kid themselves—Buck was surely going to die. But Clyde thought that if Buck was going to take so much time doing it, he might be able to fulfill a promise he and Buck had made to Cumie. They’d told her that if one of them was badly wounded, the other would try to bring his brother back to West Dallas so he could die surrounded by family. Maybe now they could make a run home from Iowa to Texas, and Buck could be left with Cumie and Henry. Blanche could stay there, too. Her eyes were seriously hurt. The left one in particular still had a large piece of glass stuck in it—they’d tried to pluck it out with tweezers but failed. Clearly Blanche needed medical attention if her eyesight was to be saved. The bullet-riddled V-8 they’d been driving would never make the trip—even if it did hold up for 750-plus miles, it would attract too much attention. So on the afternoon of Sunday, July 23, Clyde and W.D. drove into the neighboring town of Perry and stole another Ford V-8 sedan. They drove both cars back to the campsite. Then Clyde and Bonnie went into Dexter for a final food run. They had decided to start back to Texas in the morning.
But the Barrow Gang weren’t the only ones in their part of Dexfield Park that Sunday. Henry Nye, a hired hand for one of the local farmers, had wandered through the woods near the Barrow camp in search of blackberries. He may not have seen the gang’s camp, and, even if he did, there wouldn’t have been anything odd about some temporary squatters. But in the nearby timber, Nye discovered the ashes of a fire where someone had tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to burn bloody bandages and car seat cushions. That was unusual enough for Nye to head to Dexter, where he told store clerk and night marshal John Love about what he’d found. Love went out to the park himself, found a vantage point and used binoculars to study the camp and the people in it. Nobody now is sure if he saw all five gang members, or if he did his spying while Clyde and W.D. were away stealing the Ford V-8 in Perry. But whatever Love saw, it was enough. He hurried back to Dexter and called the sheriff’s office in the county seat of Adel. When Sheriff Clint Knee heard the various descriptions—the bloody, partially burned bandages, a badly hurt man lying on a makeshift bed, two women, a short, limping stranger in Dexter who was driving a car full of bullet holes—he told Love that Dexfield Park was apparently occupied by the Barrow Gang. Love asked him to bring his “heavy artillery” and get right on over. Knee put in calls to the state’s Bureau of Investigation, the Des Moines police department, the Polk County sheriff, and the National Guard. Everybody wanted a piece of the capture of the Barrows.
Even as the law began to converge on the town, Clyde and Bonnie drove into Dexter. They returned all the plates to Blohm’s Restaurant and bought hot dogs to cook for breakfast the next day. It’s possible word had already gotten around about who they were—decades later, lots of Dexter old-timers would claim to have seen them that evening. If so, Clyde and Bonnie apparently didn’t notice anything unusual. They made their purchases and went back to the camp in Dexfield Park.
That night, Buck slept in the back seat of the freshly stolen V-8 sedan. Blanche, still mostly blind and exhausted from sitting up with him, prepared for another long dark-to-dawn vigil. Bonnie, wracked with pain herself, generously offered to sit up with Buck instead. She told Blanche to lie down in the front seat and get some sleep. Blanche tried, but sleep wouldn’t come. She wrote later about how everyone felt jittery, especially when a screech owl kept sailing by the car and “hollering.”
Back in Dexter, the lawmen convened to plan a dawn attack on the camp. Besides Clint Knee and John Love, there were Polk County officers Rags Riley and L. E. Forbes and two police detectives plus six other officers from Des Moines. That was a strong contingent, but the townspeople of Dexfield wanted to get in on the action, too. Knee and Love didn’t mind. It made sense to attack the fearsome Barrow Gang with as many armed men as possible. Herschel Keller, an area dentist who served in the National Guard, helpfully brought his own Thompson submachine gun. The rest of the locals carried an array of weaponry that ranged from small-caliber rifles to handguns. The Des Moines newspaper sent a photographer. A few teenaged boys added themselves to a mob that eventually totaled about fifty. Before they left for the park, many in the unruly posse fortified themselves with liquor. John Love thought too many of them acted “like it was a hayride or something. We had to take guns off three of them who weren’t safe to have them.” Still, Knee and Love managed to get their crew out to the park under cover of night. Several of them used cars to block the bridge and road leading out of the park. As the sun came up just past 5 A.M. on Monday, July 24, the rest of the posse advanced on their quarry.
Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche began to stir in the two cars. Bonnie wore only a thin nightgown. July nights were hot in Iowa. W.D. was up ahead of everyone else. He started a fire and began roasting hot dogs for everyone’s breakfast. Then someone in the posse stepped on brittle brush or a branch, and the crackling sound alerted Clyde. He screamed out a warning, and the posse started shooting. Clyde and W.D. grabbed BARs and returned fire, but both were quickly wounded. W.D. had superficial wounds to his face. Clyde was hit in the left arm, which was either broken or at least badly injured. Another shotgun pellet dug a bloody groove across his left cheekbone. He and W.D. joined Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche in the V-8 sedan—Buck was stretched across the back seat, and Blanche had thrown herself on top of him as a shield. Clyde tried to drive the car right through the posse, but the Ford got stuck on a tree stump. They got out, Clyde firing at the attackers, W.D. shooting and trying to help Bonnie, Blanche hauling Buck, who was trying to stumble forward, all of them scrambling toward their other car, but the posse saw what they were attempting and began firing at the vehicle and it rocked from the combined impact of their bullets. Taking only a handgun—the BARs were too heavy to carry on the run—Clyde turned and led his staggering companions north on foot, down a hill toward the South Raccoon River, which was fairly placid in the summer dawn but still waist-deep. Clyde tried to hold the posse at bay with pistol shots, but not even halfway down the hill Buck fainted.
Clyde faced a terrible decision. If he and the others kept going there was a chance they might be able to get across the river and escape the posse. But Buck was down and apparently done for. Bonnie was still crippled. To have even the slightest chance of saving her, he had to leave his doomed brother behind. There was no time to think everything through carefully. Clyde and W.D. dragged Bonnie down the hill toward the river. Blanche stayed with Buck where he had fallen.
The posse closed in cautiously. The BAR fire from Clyde and W.D. had convinced most of the amateurs that shootouts were more serious than hayrides, though only one of the attackers had been hur
t so far—Polk County cop Rags Riley suffered a superficial head wound. Buck quickly regained consciousness and gasped to Blanche that she needed to run. He said he was too tired to go on. But she pulled him to his feet and they lurched toward some nearby trees before collapsing on the ground behind a log. Part of the posse continued pursuing Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D., but some of them, led by tommy gun–toting dentist Herschel Keller, split off after Blanche and Buck. When they spotted them behind the log they began firing. Buck had a pistol, and he fired back before he was hit several times in the body. Later, Keller claimed a shot from his tommy gun inflicted Buck Barrow’s grievous head wound. He may have believed it. Blanche told Buck there was no more hope, and helped him stand up so they could surrender. The posse members pulled them apart, and Buck slumped back to the ground. The photographer from the Des Moines newspaper raised his camera to snap a photo and, as he did, Blanche shrieked. Because of her injured eyes, all she could see was a shadowy figure aiming something at her. She thought it was a gun, and that she and Buck were about to be summarily executed. Instead, they were placed in separate cars and driven into Dexter for emergency medical treatment.
Meanwhile, Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. pushed into the thick brush at the bottom of the hill near the bank of the South Raccoon River. The undergrowth was so tangled that the posse couldn’t spot them without plunging into it themselves. Their pursuers stood back, yelled for the fugitives to give themselves up, and fired some random shots into the brush. A few shotgun pellets hit Bonnie in the abdomen, not wounding her seriously but still cutting deep enough to soak the side of her nightgown with blood. Clearly, Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. couldn’t stay where they were. On the other side of the river, a board fence marked the boundary of a farm. Clyde told the other two to stay put until he called for them. Then, holding the .45 he’d emptied during their flight, he waded across the river. Apparently the posse didn’t see him. Perhaps their attention was diverted by the capture of Buck and Blanche. As soon as Clyde was gone, Bonnie told W.D. she wished she had a gun. When he replied that she couldn’t do any good with it, meaning she couldn’t fight off the posse, Bonnie replied that she wanted to use it to kill herself, since Clyde was done for and she didn’t want to live without him.
On the farm on the far side of the river, nineteen-year-old Marvelle Feller wondered why there was so much shooting going on at the old abandoned park. Marvelle and his family had no idea the Barrow Gang was cornered there. None of them had been to town the day before, and word hadn’t reached them. As part of his usual morning routine, Marvelle was up at 5 A.M. to milk the family cows. His German shepherd, Rex, kept him company as he headed toward the barn. But the gunfire had him curious, so Marvelle climbed over the board fence, milk pail still in one hand, to see what was going on. Suddenly Clyde emerged dripping from the river. Rex barked, and Clyde pointed his pistol and told Marvelle to “pull your dog off, or I’ll shoot him.” The pistol was empty, but only Clyde knew that. He put his fingers to his mouth, whistled shrilly, and W.D. waded across the South Raccoon carrying Bonnie. She was nearly unconscious. The posse remained on the far shore of the river, apparently not yet realizing that their quarry had crossed it.
Marvelle’s father, Vallie, and a hired hand came up just as W.D. and Bonnie reached the fence. Brandishing his empty .45, Clyde ordered Vallie Feller to help Bonnie over the fence. Vallie and Marvelle carried her toward their farmhouse. Scared as he was, Marvelle would recall almost seventy-five years later how nice he thought Bonnie looked in her thin nightgown, even though she was fainting and splattered with blood.
As they all came into the yard, Marguerite Feller and her nine-year-old daughter, Louise, emerged from the house, shouting out that someone from town had just called to say the Barrow Gang was across the river in the park. She stopped short at the sight of Clyde with his gun. Blood streaming down his face from the cut on his cheekbone, Clyde assured the Fellers that he didn’t intend to hurt anyone: “The laws are shooting the hell out of us and all we want is a way out of here.” In the Fellers’ garage were two cars, a Model A roadster up on blocks and a 1929 Plymouth. When Clyde ordered him to back the Plymouth out of the garage, Vallie Feller replied that there was no gas it in. The family wasn’t able to afford any. But he added that they had some kerosene, and if they used that the Plymouth would probably run for a while.
Clyde had no other option. The posse would figure out any minute that the fugitives had crossed the river. Bonnie was in terrible shape, and W.D. wasn’t much better. Clyde’s own wounds, especially the ones to his left arm, were also serious. Buck and Blanche were undoubtedly already in custody, if they were even still alive. It was the Plymouth and kerosene or nothing.
Vallie poured kerosene into the Plymouth’s tank, got the engine started, and backed the car out of the garage. Clyde told Marvelle to pick up Bonnie and lay her in the back seat. The teenager didn’t need much urging. He enjoyed carrying her, though the blood on the side of her nightgown shook him a little. After Bonnie was settled, Clyde got behind the wheel of the Plymouth and W. D. Jones clambered in beside him. Clyde yelled to Vallie, “Don’t shoot at us,” and drove out onto a narrow road in front of the farmhouse. The Fellers watched as their Plymouth went rattling off to the north, traveling at high speed for a car fueled by kerosene. Later that day it was found abandoned in Polk City, thirty-eight miles north of Dexter. The Plymouth’s windshield was shattered—Clyde had rammed the car into a Polk City telephone pole—and its seat cushions were stained with blood. After some negotiations when the Polk City authorities wanted $15 to have the Plymouth towed to Dexter, the Fellers got their car back. But Marguerite Feller was traumatized by her family’s brush with the Barrow Gang, and she refused to ever ride in the Plymouth again.
After the posse on the far side of the South Raccoon River finally crossed over to the Feller farm and learned of the gang’s escape, officials of Iowa’s State Bureau of Investigation launched a statewide search that included airplanes flying low along back roads trying to spot the three fugitives. They never did. In Polk City, Clyde replaced the Fellers’ Plymouth with yet another stolen Ford V-8. Four days later, on July 28, that car was found abandoned in Broken Bow, Nebraska, its back seat littered with bloody bandages, medicine bottles, and copies of the Des Moines papers with stories about the shootout in Dexfield Park. But there was no sign of Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. They’d gotten away again.
CHAPTER 21
Buck and Blanche
Doctors Keith Chapler and Robert Osborn were performing an early-morning tonsillectomy in Dexter on the 24th of July when the posse arrived at their office with Buck and Blanche. Surgery was interrupted while the physicians tended to their emergency patients. Buck was coherent enough to tell them that the only treatment he’d received was hydrogen peroxide poured directly into the hole in his head, plus some aspirin. Chapler and Osborn thought that primitive care had been surprisingly effective. The head wound was relatively clean. Buck was in more pain from several bullet wounds he’d received in Dexfield Park, particularly one from a .45 slug that struck him in the back, glanced off a rib, and lodged in his chest. The Dexter doctors recommended that he be transferred immediately to King’s Daughters Hospital in nearby Perry.
Blanche’s only injuries were from the glass in her eyes. Her main concern was for her husband. At first the lawmen tried to keep them separated, but finally Blanche was allowed to join Buck where he lay on a stretcher on the floor. He asked for a cigarette. Blanche lit it for him, then was taken to another room to have her eyes examined. She never saw Buck again.
Chapler and Osborn went with Buck to Perry, where they performed surgery the same day to remove the bullet from his chest. Afterward, their prognosis was grim—Buck would die either from his head wound or else from pneumonia resulting from the chest surgery. It was only a matter of days.
News of the ambush and Buck’s capture and imminent death reached West Dallas that same day. Cumie immediately prepared to leave for Iowa. Though he was t
he archenemy of her sons, Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid showed considerable compassion toward the grieving mother, meeting with Cumie and providing a letter of introduction to the Iowa authorities. In it, Schmid asked that she be allowed to see Buck. L.C. accompanied Cumie, and so did Emma and Billie Jean Parker. May Turner, a friend of Blanche’s, made the trip, too. Before they left early Tuesday morning, Cumie told a Dallas Morning News reporter that “I don’t care what people say, they’re my boys and I love them.” In denial as always, she added, “I don’t believe they’ve done all the things they’re accused of.” Schmid or one of his officers provided money for travel expenses, another generous gesture.
While they were on the way, riding in a Model T Ford driven by L.C.—the drive took thirty-six hours—two Arkansas lawmen came to Perry to question Buck before he died. Under heavy guard in his hospital bed, Buck was almost chatty as he greeted Crawford County sheriff Albert Maxey and Alma deputy Red Salyers. They arrived already convinced that Buck was the killer of Henry Humphrey—the pistol taken from Humphrey during the June 23 gunfight outside Alma was among the many weapons recovered by the posse at the gang’s Dexfield Park campsite. Buck was quick to confess. When he entered Buck’s hospital room on July 25, Salyers asked, “Do you remember me?” Buck replied, “I sure do. It was a good thing you got out of the way, or you might have got yours.”
Jeff Guinn Page 27