From Dallas, Hamer went to the places where Clyde and Bonnie had recently been spotted. In Shreveport, Louisiana, he found stores where they had purchased pants, underwear, gloves, and an automatic shotgun. At a recently abandoned Barrow Gang camp outside Wichita Falls, discarded store receipts led Hamer back to a shop near Dallas, where the clerk helpfully told him about the sizes and colors of some dresses Bonnie bought. (After the Sowers ambush, Clyde and Bonnie were apparently reluctant to let Marie and L.C. risk doing their shopping for them.) Hamer visited with Joplin chief of detectives Ed Portley, who’d been trying for so long to organize a coordinated pursuit of the Barrow Gang. Naturally, Portley was glad to help, providing Hamer with details about the personal belongings the gang left behind after the April 13 shootout in Joplin the previous year.
Most of all, Hamer did his best to mimic Clyde’s driving babits and the way the gang camped out in their car at night. He soon believed he’d discerned a pattern—after visiting with their families somewhere outside Dallas, Clyde and Bonnie would drive north into Oklahoma or northeast into Arkansas or Missouri, then swing south into Louisiana and finally west back to Texas. They’d occasionally extend their itinerary to states like Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota, but the other five comprised their most regular haunts. Nonstop days behind the wheel convinced the ex-Ranger captain that Clyde could travel farther in a day than any fugitive Hamer had ever trailed. Sometimes when he camped in his V-8 at night, Hamer ate hot dogs and hamburgers purchased as takeout food from cafés, just like the Barrow Gang did.
In these early days of pursuit, Hamer made plans. He was certain he’d eventually corner Clyde and Bonnie. It was the manner in which he’d take down these two desperadoes that concerned him. Clearly, Clyde Barrow did not intend to be taken alive. He’d shot and driven his way out of apparently hopeless situations in Platte City, Dexfield Park, and Sowers. If possible, Hamer wanted to avoid a shootout. He didn’t mind the idea of gunning down Clyde Barrow and any other male crooks that were with him. From newspaper accounts and police reports, Hamer learned about the post-Eastham robberies in Rembrandt, Poteau, and Knierim by the latest incarnation of the Barrow Gang. Hilton Bybee had been recaptured. Raymond Hamilton was clearly running with Clyde Barrow again, and apparently Joe Palmer was, too, along with young Henry Methvin, the punk from northeastern Louisiana. Hamer would have no problems shooting them, too, if it came to that. They were peripheral anyway. The two people he was after, the pair he’d been commissioned to put out of criminal commission, were Clyde and Bonnie. But the idea of killing a woman bothered him tremendously. Hamer had no respect for Bonnie Parker—he referred to her as “a female dog in heat,” and, like many other lawmen, was convinced she must be a walking repository of venereal disease since any woman who voluntarily ran with outlaws was clearly promiscuous. Yet it seemed obvious to Hamer that Bonnie wouldn’t allow herself to be separated from Clyde. If bullets flew at Clyde, they’d have to fly right at Bonnie, too. So Hamer decided he would try to trap the couple when they were “at home.” Though they moved about a lot, it also seemed true that sometimes they would set up camp out in the country and stay in one place for several days. If Hamer could discover the location of such a relatively long-term camp and sneak up on Clyde and Bonnie while they slept, he believed he could “tap each one on the head, kick their weapons out of reach, and handcuff them before they knew what it was all about.” If it worked out that way, not a single shot would be fired. If gunplay did occur, at least there wouldn’t be any civilians around to be caught in the possible crossfire.
And so Hamer drove and stopped and questioned local authorities and moved on again. He kept detailed expense accounts, expecting reimbursement for job-related expenditures. These were turned in to Simmons every two weeks. One still exists, stuffed in a file folder in the archives of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco. According to this document, during the two weeks of February 15–28, Hamer drove 1,397 miles and was reimbursed at the rate of three cents per mile. He spent a few nights in his car and ten in hotels, so he wasn’t camping out most of the time during this particular stretch. From the 23rd through the 28th he spent the nights in a hotel in Sanger, a small town north of Dallas and just below the Texas-Oklahoma border. From there he probably ranged into Oklahoma and parts of Arkansas and Louisiana, returning to the hotel at night. Sanger was convenient to many of the places he needed to go.
Frank Hamer was a secretive man. He realized that the longer Clyde and Bonnie had no idea he was on their trail, the better chance he had of catching them off-guard or asleep in their camp. Lee Simmons had made no formal announcement of Hamer’s hiring. As he drove, Hamer contacted county and town law officers, letting them know what he was trying to do and asking them to contact him (by mail via General Delivery in Dallas) or Lee Simmons in Huntsville if they had any leads. Word spread among law enforcement agencies. But where the general public was concerned, Hamer’s policy was based on deception rather than honesty. He granted no interviews while the hunt was in its early stages, and after that Hamer gave journalists and historians details of his pursuit that weren’t true. He undoubtedly did this to conceal the identities of those helping him—by Hamer’s reckoning, the rest of the Barrow family or some of Clyde’s criminal friends were apt to retaliate against whoever informed on him.
During the first four weeks of his pursuit, Hamer didn’t have any informants to protect. Then around the second week in March, he was contacted by Henderson Jordan, sheriff of Bienville Parish in northwest Louisiana. Sheriff Jordan wanted Hamer to come meet with him and someone willing to help set a trap for Clyde and Bonnie—forty-nine-year-old Ivy Methvin, the father of the Eastham escapee who was still traveling with them as the third member of the Barrow Gang.
CHAPTER 27
The Methvins Make a Deal
Many of the people in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, who knew Ivy and Ava Methvin didn’t like them. Ivy was a mean-tempered drunk and Ava was nasty, too. Along with other impoverished Methvins—their two sons and daughters-in-law, Ivy’s brother, dozens of nieces and nephews—they lived in the parish’s mazelike backwoods, but even among so many poor relations Ivy and Ava were probably the worst off of the lot. They made a habit of dropping in on other Methvins precisely at suppertime. Ava further annoyed everyone by routinely refusing to help wash the dishes afterward. For a while, Ivy and Ava may even have been reduced to living in a tent.
Ivy hadn’t always been poor. Before the Depression, he had earned a decent living making chairs and hauling freight with a mule team. During Prohibition, local authorities were certain Ivy was involved in bootlegging, but he was never a big enough player to merit arrest. By 1934, he and Ava were just one more aging, hardscrabble couple trying desperately to hang on.
It helped that Terrell and Cecil, two of their three sons, lived in Bienville Parish. They felt obligated to help their parents and did what they could for them. Their third son, Henry, the middle child, was another story. In 1930 at age eighteen he did the same thing as many other Depression-era poor boys, heading west in search of work. Henry found sporadic employment as an oilfield roughneck in New Mexico and Texas, but one night out on the West Texas plains an incident occurred that landed Henry on Eastham Prison Farm. His parents and cousins swore that while hitchhiking Henry accepted a ride with a man who made homosexual advances. In fighting the fellow off, Henry happened to pull out a small knife and slash him across the throat. Panicking, he tossed the would-be predator out of the car and drove away. The police saw it differently. According to them, Henry knifed a man who’d been kind enough to give him a lift, and stole the fellow’s car besides. The victim survived, and Henry was arrested. A jury believed the victim, and Henry received a ten-year sentence on Eastham farm for assault with intent to murder and car theft.
Ivy and Ava Methvin became obsessed with getting Henry out of prison. Ivy made several trips to Texas, imploring state officials to grant his son a pardon or parole. Somehow Ava found $100 for lawyers, and b
y mid-January 1934 she believed they were close to bringing Henry back to Louisiana. But then Henry lost his head and ran off with Clyde Barrow during the January 16 break, when if he’d just sat tight at Eastham farm he could have walked out a free man shortly afterward. It grated on the older Methvins. They wanted their boy home where he belonged. As far as Ava and Ivy were concerned, Clyde and Bonnie weren’t in any way Henry’s saviors. Instead, they were messing up his life.
In February the Barrow Gang came to Bienville Parish, bringing Henry home for a brief visit. There was hardly time for his parents to talk to him, and Clyde and Bonnie were always nearby. Then the gang returned in early March. Ava remembered later that it was the first day of the month, but it was probably right after Clyde kicked Raymond out of the gang in Terre Haute on March 6. They hung around longer this time, several days, and Ivy volunteered to help them find a place to stay. The old Cole place near Cecil and Clemmie Methvin’s home had been deserted ever since a couple of Coles died of tuberculosis a few years earlier. In 1934, TB was considered a mysterious, monstrous affliction, a deadly plague rather than an illness, and so the abandoned house remained exactly as it had been left, with beds and chairs and all the rest of its furnishings intact. Nobody would live there. Clyde and Bonnie weren’t afraid of tuberculosis. They expected to die young, and not from disease. So when Ivy showed them the house they started using it as a day stop, though they still camped someplace else at night in their car. Clyde’s reservation about the Cole place was that there was only one narrow dirt road leading to it—if the gang got ambushed there, they wouldn’t have an alternative escape route.
To Clyde and Bonnie, Bienville Parish seemed a fine place to stay and rest awhile. Besides giving one of their gang members the opportunity to visit with his family—something they always encouraged—the location was perfect, too. An easy three-or four-hour drive on Highway 80 from West Dallas, the parish was also only forty miles or so east of Shreveport, meaning there was access to big-city restaurants and dry cleaners. The parish itself was in the heart of the northwest Louisiana woodlands. Before the Depression it had been relatively well-to-do cotton country. Now many of its residents eked out marginal livings cutting and hauling timber. The parish’s two major towns, the county seat of Arcadia and, nine miles to the west, Gibsland, were linked by rail and also by Highway 80, the main east–west thoroughfare in the northern portion of the state. Itinerant salesmen making the upper Louisiana circuit between Shreveport and Monroe often stopped for the night in Bienville Parish, with Gibsland’s Colbert Hotel a favorite lodging place. Gibsland also had a small college, an ice house, and two cotton gins. Residents and transients frequently took meals at Ma Canfield’s Café on Main Street, though locals called it Rosa’s because that was her first name. The rest of the parish sprawled away to the south, intersected by winding dirt and gravel roads and offering all sorts of hiding places among thick brush and timber. Smaller farming communities—Mount Lebanon, Sailes, Jamestown—dotted the area. Everyone knew everybody else’s business. It was hard to keep secrets there.
Soon after Henry Methvin’s visit home in early March 1934, a fellow named John Joyner requested a top-secret meeting with Bienville Parish sheriff Henderson Jordan. Joyner told Jordan that Ivy Methvin wanted to see him, but they’d have to meet somewhere out in the country so no one else would know. Jordan could guess what Old Man Methvin wanted to talk about. It was common knowledge that Henry Methvin had been broken out of a Texas prison by Clyde Barrow and was now running with Clyde’s gang. Along with Joyner and Bienville Parish deputy Prentiss Oakley, Jordan went out to meet Ivy Methvin on an isolated back road.
Ivy told Jordan that the Barrow Gang had twice come to Bienville Parish for visits, first in February and then just a few days earlier. During this second visit Henry had the chance to talk to his mother in private and told Ava he was prepared to put Clyde and Bonnie “on the spot” for lawmen in return for his own freedom. Henry believed Clyde and Bonnie were bound to be killed soon, and he thought that if he stayed with them he would probably die, too. So, to save his own life, he was willing to betray them. After the gang left, Ivy had asked Joyner to help him broker a deal for Henry with Sheriff Jordan.
Jordan, a country cop who had no background in the law before being elected sheriff, suggested to Ivy Methvin that his son simply turn himself in. Henry would undoubtedly have to serve out the time remaining in his Texas prison term, but at least he’d be alive. Methvin said his son wouldn’t consider doing that. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were cold-blooded killers. If Henry turned himself in and went back to jail, they would think he might inform on them. So, even if Henry was in prison, they’d find a way to murder him. Besides, it was Clyde and Bonnie that the law really wanted, not his and Ava’s boy. Henry would help bring them down, but he had to have a full pardon in return. Jordan explained to Methvin that he didn’t have the authority to negotiate on behalf of the state of Texas. He asked for time to think about what to do next. Methvin begged him to keep their meeting a secret. He told Jordan that if Clyde and Bonnie found out what Henry wanted to do, they’d not only kill him but his entire family.
After Jordan got back to his office in Arcadia, he contacted Special Agent L. A. (Lester) Kindell, who ran the U.S. Justice Department’s Division of Investigation office in New Orleans. Federal officers were after the Barrow Gang for car theft—murder charges were still state crimes. Kindell and Jordan talked several times. The federal agent certainly wanted to nab Clyde and Bonnie. His boss, J. Edgar Hoover, had made apprehending celebrity outlaws a top priority. Hoover’s trip to Platte City, Missouri, to personally interrogate Blanche Barrow after her capture was evidence of that. But despite representing the federal government, Hoover and Kindell couldn’t grant a pardon to Henry Methvin for an assault with intent to murder conviction in Texas. For that, someone from Texas state government had to be involved. Jordan made inquiries, probably to Texas prison general manager Lee Simmons, and at an unspecified date in mid-March Jordan, Kindell, and Frank Hamer met in Shreveport. Dallas County deputy Bob Alcorn and John Joyner were also present. Jordan spelled out what Ivy Methvin wanted—a complete pardon for his son Henry. As part of his arrangement with Lee Simmons, Frank Hamer could negotiate such a deal. Hamer told Joyner that Henry would receive his pardon if the Methvins’ help resulted in the capture or death of Clyde and Bonnie. Joyner replied that Ivy and Ava Methvin had to have the promise in writing. That was fine with Hamer. It took a few weeks, but he produced an agreement signed by Governor Ferguson and Simmons. The next time Clyde and Bonnie arrived in Bienville Parish with Henry for a visit, Ivy was to contact Sheriff Jordan and tell him when and where they could be found.
After negotiating the deal the Methvins wanted, Frank Hamer believed he would be contacted by Henderson Jordan as soon as the county sheriff learned that Clyde and Bonnie were back. Hamer said later that Jordan “agreed to assist me and pay no attention to other officers, state or federal.” If Jordan did make such a promise to Hamer, he broke it. Though he didn’t have the authority to cut the state deal required by the Methvins, Division of Investigation Special Agent Kindell still wanted the glory of catching the Barrow Gang to accrue to the Justice Department. Though murder and bank robbery were state rather than federal crimes, Kindell had the authority to pursue the Barrow Gang for car theft and kidnapping. On March 24, Kindell met with Jordan again at the Bienville Parish sheriff’s office in Arcadia. Kindell’s request was simple: if, at some point, Jordan found out where Clyde and Bonnie were hiding in the parish, he wanted the sheriff to call him before notifying Hamer. Maybe the couple could even be caught without a specific tip from the Methvin family. After all, Kindell wasn’t bound by any agreement between the Methvins and the state of Texas. It made no difference to him whether Henry Methvin got pardoned or not. From that point, Jordan cooperated with Kindell as well as with Hamer, and Hamer didn’t know it.
Hamer must have believed everything might work out perfectly. He conceivably w
ould get the chance to take down Clyde and Bonnie less than two months after he’d been hired to hunt them. If he got the drop on the criminal couple in Louisiana, the Barrow Gang would be shut down, justice would be served, and at minimal time and expense. The deal agreed to with the Methvins was simplicity itself, with the state of Texas pardoning Henry Methvin for a single act of attempted murder. It wasn’t like Henry had actually killed someone.
And then on April 1, Easter Sunday, that wasn’t true anymore.
CHAPTER 28
Bloody Easter
After leaving Bienville Parish in early March, Clyde and Bonnie drove directly to West Dallas to see their families. Henry Methvin went with them. They trusted him completely, even though they had only known Henry since the Eastham breakout on January 16. Clyde always had at least some shared history with partners who remained on the road with him for more than a job or two: Ralph Fults was a friend in prison, Buck Barrow was his brother, and Raymond Hamilton and W. D. Jones were two fellow refugees from the West Dallas slums whose families had known the Barrows for years. But Henry’s criminal credentials seemed impressive enough—he’d been serving time for attempted murder, and his participation in post–Eastham break robberies was enthusiastic and competent. He loved his family, another plus for Clyde and Bonnie. For all that the true crime magazines wrote about Clyde’s near-mystical ability to sense potential danger, that instinct failed completely where Henry Methvin was concerned. While Henry’s parents were betraying them to Henderson Jordan, L. A. Kindell, and Frank Hamer in Louisiana, Clyde and Bonnie were bringing Henry to a March 12 get-together with their parents and siblings out in the country near Dallas. None of the other Barrows or Parkers suspected Henry was up to anything, either—when Clyde’s sister Nell accidentally ran her car into a ditch upon arrival, Henry yanked wire from a fence to help haul it out. Bonnie told everyone that Raymond Hamilton and Mary O’Dare had suggested that she turn on Clyde, and emphasized how Henry loyally stayed with them after the other two were gone.
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