Though Marshal Wright didn’t reveal to the Dallas Dispatch reporter when or how prison officials learned of the proposed breakout, he did explain how Clyde had planned to free Stevens, May, and Howard sometime before their mid-June trial: “Barrow was to appear at night with another man under the guise of an officer seeking lodging for a prisoner…. Once inside the jail, they were to take charge of [the] guards and free the prisoners.”
Based on when Clyde and Bonnie first discussed acquiring property in Louisiana with their families, the deal between Stevens and Clyde was in place by mid-April. But Clyde would have had some concerns—what would happen, for instance, if he died while leading the breakout attempt? While the money involved was impressive, so was the risk. Bonnie was crippled, and without Clyde she probably couldn’t fend for herself. Their families deserved some kind of guaranteed compensation for all they’d suffered. Desperate and well heeled, Stevens clearly would have been open to a demand from Clyde for payment in advance. Eighteen thousand dollars in cash would pay for land in Louisiana, provide a financial safety net for Bonnie, and bankroll several weeks of downtime for Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry in Bienville Parish while Clyde hatched a plan to free Stevens, May, and Howard from the Tarrant County jail. There’s evidence Clyde tried to hire outside help for the job. Several months later, Henry Methvin told Justice Department Division of Investigation Special Agent L. A. Kindell that in late April Clyde made unsuccessful attempts to contact Pretty Boy Floyd in Oklahoma, once even driving there to look for him. Pretty Boy would never have agreed to work on a long-shot prison breakout with someone he disdained so much. But it would have made sense for Clyde to try to recruit him because Pretty Boy was involved in the June 17, 1933, assault at Union Station in Kansas City that attempted to free notorious criminal Frank Nash from federal custody. Floyd and his cohorts failed, but “the Kansas City Massacre,” which left three local lawmen and a federal agent dead, was widely considered the most audacious rescue attempt in modern criminal history. This was “the Kansas City Depot job” to which Bonnie referred in her poem “The End of the Line.”
By the time Clyde met with his father in West Dallas on the night of May 7, it is highly likely that he had some or all of Stevens’s money in hand—Henry Barrow saw wads of cash filling Clyde’s open suitcase. The $700 from the Everly bank robbery on May 3 wouldn’t have taken up so much space.
Identifying the papers Clyde wanted to sign in West Dallas that night is more difficult. He seemed, when he spoke to his family about the matter in mid-April, to know exactly what property in Louisiana he wanted to buy—something near where the Methvin clan lived. Though his occasional presence with Bonnie in Bienville Parish wasn’t much of a secret, Clyde couldn’t walk into the parish courthouse in Arcadia and file documents for a land purchase. Perhaps he planned to use a middleman like Ivy Methvin, but in that case it wouldn’t have been necessary for Clyde to sign anything. One possibility is that on May 7 Clyde wanted to sign and leave with his parents a will and testament bequeathing them all of his possessions, including the large amount of cash that could not be legally connected to any robberies by the Barrow Gang. Then if he died attempting to free O. D. Stevens from the Tarrant County jail, Henry and Cumie would still be able to buy the Louisiana property. If Clyde survived, he could negotiate the purchase himself.
So during the second and third weeks in May, Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry Methvin stayed in Bienville Parish. There were no Barrow Gang robberies during that time—for a change, they didn’t need the money. Clyde and Bonnie weren’t foolish enough to think the local “laws” were unaware of their presence, but it must have seemed as though the parish sheriff was willing to leave them alone as long as they didn’t commit any crimes in his jurisdiction.
Sheriff Henderson Jordan was certainly avoiding the Barrow Gang, but not for the reason Clyde and Bonnie probably thought. Jordan and Frank Hamer were in constant contact. Hamer undoubtedly reminded Jordan to leave the couple alone so they’d feel safe in Bienville Parish and grow careless. The former Texas Ranger captain was waiting for just the right time to strike, a moment when Clyde and Bonnie were well away from civilians and in a spot where escape was impossible. Ivy Methvin was still expected to help arrange the ambush, even though he continued irritating Sheriff Jordan with his constant whining that Clyde and Bonnie were going to find out what was going on and kill them all.
On May 9, Hamer and his posse made a quick trip to Louisiana. They probably met Jordan in Shreveport so there was less chance of being spotted by the Barrow Gang. Jordan was confident enough to tell the four lawmen from Texas that they should get ready—something might break within the next three weeks. Until then, they should wait for his call.
CHAPTER 35
Haven
With the exception of Ivy, Ava, and Henry, the rest of the Methvin clan in Bienville Parish didn’t know Clyde and Bonnie were being put “on the spot.” The other Methvins treated the Texas couple as honored guests. During the first three weeks in May 1934, Henry’s brother Terrell and sister-in-law Emma frequently invited Clyde and Bonnie to dinner. Henry would come, too, along with Ivy and Ava. Bonnie enjoyed playing with Van and Dean, Terrell and Emma’s two young daughters. Sometimes they’d vary the routine with picnics at nearby Black Lake, cooking dinner on campfires near the shore. These were happy occasions. There was no sign of the law—Henderson Jordan was keeping his distance—and Clyde and Bonnie could relax with their hosts. They seemed to enjoy these tastes of normal family life. On their first visit to Terrell and Emma’s home, they saw a beautiful handmade bed in Van and Dean’s room. Ivy Methvin, a talented furniture maker, had crafted the bed for his granddaughters. Clyde and Bonnie couldn’t resist lying down on it. Bonnie told Terrell and Emma it was the first time they’d been in a real bed “since they didn’t know when.”
Clyde undoubtedly repaid the hospitality with gifts, just as he had done for anyone offering hospitality since he and Bonnie left West Dallas for lives of roving crime. Clyde’s sister Marie and other Barrow family members said later that his largesse toward the Methvins included buying Ivy Methvin land and a new truck. That was an exaggeration—there’s no record of Ivy acquiring property during this time, and the truck he drove was well known in the parish as a rattletrap. Had Ivy suddenly begun tooling around the local roads in a gleaming new vehicle, his neighbors would have noticed. But certainly Clyde did give various Methvins at least small sums of money. He was always generous.
The only member of the extended Methvin clan who didn’t immediately take to Clyde and Bonnie was Clemmie, the wife of Henry’s brother Cecil. In May 1934, Clemmie, probably in her mid-to late teens, was newly pregnant and feeling queasy. Accordingly, she didn’t go to the dinners or along on the picnics, and she pleaded with Emma Methvin not to let her daughters tag along with the famous criminals. “I told her them little old kids was innocent,” Clemmie recalled later. The local “laws” would come after Clyde and Bonnie sometime, she was certain, “they’d start shooting in there and kill them little girls, and [Emma] wouldn’t let me keep them and I wouldn’t go [to the dinners and picnics].” Sometime around the middle of May, Clemmie was dismayed when Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry showed up at her house while she was fixing supper. It was apparently a spur-of-the-moment visit, and Clemmie felt obligated to invite them in. Bonnie was too drunk to get out of the car. Clyde left her there while he and Henry joined Clemmie and Cecil for a meal of ham and corn bread. Afterward, Clyde explained that Bonnie had a hard life and was in a lot of pain, so he let her have all the whiskey she wanted. He carried Bonnie in from the car, and she was alert enough to eat some corn bread herself, asking for more to take with her when she left. Then Bonnie and Clemmie had a private chat, the kind of girl talk Bonnie rarely had the opportunity to enjoy. When Clemmie mentioned she was pregnant, Bonnie replied that she was, too. Bonnie added that, like Clemmie’s, her baby was due late in the year.
This was undoubtedly wishful thinking on Bonnie’s part. Both her moth
er and Clyde’s sister Marie made it clear in their memoirs that Bonnie had been unable to conceive from the time she’d married Roy Thornton, probably due to a botched gynecological procedure. Marie also insisted that Clyde was sterile because of the unspecified illness that had hospitalized him in Dallas a decade earlier. Drunk, probably feeling sad and sentimental, confiding to Clemmie Methvin that she was pregnant, too, may have been Bonnie’s way of giving herself hope of motherhood. If she just said it with enough conviction, maybe it would come true. Clemmie believed her, and told some of the other younger Methvin women. They began to plan privately among themselves—clearly, Clyde and Bonnie couldn’t raise the child, being on the constant run from the law and in danger of being killed at any moment. Perhaps one of the Methvin ladies could raise the baby, or at least they could find the child a good foster home. It would mean assuming considerable responsibility, but they were glad to do it. They cared about Bonnie. Crippled and frequently drunk, she could still turn on the charm. Henry’s cousin Percy recalled that Bonnie “didn’t weigh but about ninety pounds, and wasn’t as big as a pound of soap after a hard day’s washing, and she sure was pretty.” Willie Methvin, another cousin, added that his whole family “loved Bonnie and Clyde…. They couldn’t help themselves, you know.”
Ivy Methvin didn’t love them, and thanks to Clyde and Bonnie’s unpredictable daily movements he must have been catching hell from Sheriff Jordan. It had been two months since Ivy cut his deal with Jordan and Frank Hamer for Henry to receive a pardon from Texas in return for assistance in apprehending the couple. The agreement had become more stringent in the interim. Originally, Ivy was just supposed to slip the word to Jordan whenever he knew Clyde and Bonnie were coming to Bienville Parish. Now he was supposed to provide specific information about where they would be and when so that “the laws” could set up an ambush. That was so much easier said than done. Sometimes Ivy knew when Clyde and Bonnie were coming to have dinner with various Methvins, or when they’d join some of the family for picnics at Black Lake. But those weren’t the right times and places to tip off Jordan for an ambush. Ivy was betraying Clyde and Bonnie to save his son Henry, not to get more of his family in the line of any fire.
Hamer and his posse could still have jumped the couple on their way to Methvin family get-togethers, but that presented another problem. Most of the time, they had Henry with them, and because Clyde was obviously going to shoot rather than surrender, if Henry was present he might very well be gunned down, too. On one of the few occasions when Ivy and Ava got to talk to their boy without Clyde or Bonnie within hearing distance, they told him that he had to get away from the couple long enough for the Texas lawmen to carry out their ambush. They figured they had a way for Henry to do that. Prompted by his parents, Henry told Clyde that if they ever got unexpectedly separated, he’d find his way back to his parents’ place. Clyde and Bonnie should look for him there.
That sounded fine to Clyde. He had other things to think about. There was the O. D. Stevens rescue attempt in Fort Worth to plan, and more. Prison breakouts were much on Clyde’s mind. He’d already gotten five men (Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin, Joe Palmer, Hilton Bybee, and J. B. French) out of the Texas state prison—why not another old friend? In early May, former Barrow Gang partner and current Huntsville inmate Ralph Fults received an unsigned postcard with the message “Thinking of You. Hope to see you soon.” Fults recognized Bonnie’s handwriting, and knew he was being advised of a future attempt to break him out. Fults was especially touched by the final line Bonnie added: “Hope we all live to see the flowers bloom.”
Despite letting down his guard as he enjoyed Methvin family hospitality in Bienville Parish, Clyde was still doing one thing to ensure that he and Bonnie lived to enjoy blooming flowers a while longer. Clyde continued setting up camp for the night in various spots, making it impossible for anyone to know in advance where he and Bonnie would sleep. Around mid-May, he did set up a semipermanent place in the backwoods outside the small Louisiana town of Mangham, about ninety miles east of Gibsland and a few miles past the big town of Monroe off Highway 80. It was isolated, yet an easy drive from Bienville Parish. Just off a nearly invisible dirt track, Clyde hacked out brush to form a clearing about twenty feet wide. He and Bonnie would park their gray Ford V-8 sedan there and still have room to spread out a blanket to sit on while they ate sandwiches or cleaned guns. Because they didn’t bring Henry Methvin with them whenever they went to Mangham, Ivy Methvin had no idea they had a hideout there. But some of the Mangham locals realized somebody was staying out in the brush. They could occasionally hear gunshots—Clyde always believed in target practice. Once, some loungers at a Mangham country store stared at the shiny Ford when Clyde parked and went inside to buy Vienna sausage and crackers. No one asked the local sheriff to check out the stranger, or to investigate the shots back in the palmetto. In Mangham, practically everyone did some hunting in the backwoods. They were too busy trying to survive themselves to worry much about somebody else.
But Ivy Methvin was worrying, and so was Frank Hamer. It was one thing for Bienville Parish sheriff Henderson Jordan to say Hamer and his posse needed to sit tight in Texas until he summoned them. Sure, during their meeting on May 9 Jordan had suggested that something might happen within three weeks, but that was too long for Hamer and his men to wait around. He’d made his deal with Ivy Methvin back in March. Public outrage about the Grapevine killings on Easter Sunday hadn’t abated. Lawmen in Tarrant County, Texas, assigned to the case were desperate to arrest somebody for the murders of motorcycle patrolmen Wheeler and Murphy. They summoned back farmer William Schieffer, who’d sworn he’d gotten a good look at the two men and the woman who’d allegedly done the shooting. Schieffer picked through mug shots and announced he’d spotted two of the three killers—Floyd Hamilton, Raymond’s brother, and Billie Jean Parker, Bonnie’s sister. That was enough for the Tarrant County police. Floyd Hamilton was already in custody, held on suspicion of helping Clyde Barrow with the Eastham farm prison break on January 16. Now Floyd was informed he was also being detained on charges of double homicide. Billie Jean had left Dallas to work as a waitress in East Texas. On Saturday, May 19, she was arrested there and extradited to the Tarrant County jail in Fort Worth. Twenty-year-old Billie Jean was in shock. She was thrown in a cell and kept under constant watch.
Also on May 19, fifteen-year-old Marie Barrow married Joe Bill Francis in West Dallas. Clyde was several hundred miles away in Bienville Parish or Mangham and didn’t attend his sister’s wedding. He may not have known about it—Marie was an impulsive girl who was not in the habit of planning very far ahead. Because they weren’t in daily touch with their families Clyde and Bonnie didn’t know about Billie Jean’s arrest, either. They certainly had no idea that on this same fateful weekend of May 19–20 Frank Hamer decided he’d waited long enough for Henderson Jordan to arrange an ambush. Hamer, Manny Gault, Bob Alcorn, and Ted Hinton drove back to Louisiana. It was time to get their hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker over with.
CHAPTER 36
The Beginning of the End
On Sunday night, May 20, Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry Methvin visited Henry’s parents. Henry managed to take Ivy and Ava aside to tell them that he, Clyde, and Bonnie were driving into Shreveport the next day. While they were there he’d try to get away. If he succeeded, he’d get word to Ivy and Ava, who could then contact Sheriff Jordan. The arrangement Henry had made with Clyde and Bonnie in the event of an unexpected separation was still in place: the couple would come to look for him at his parents’ home about ten miles south of Gibsland off Louisiana Highway 154. Jordan and the Texas lawmen could set up their ambush somewhere along that narrow country byway.
On Monday, May 21, Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry went to Shreveport as planned. They had laundry to drop off, and afterward they stopped at the Majestic Café. Clyde and Bonnie waited in the car while Henry went inside and ordered three sandwiches and soft drinks to go. While he was in the café, a Shrevep
ort police patrol car cruised past. Clyde threw the Ford V-8 into gear and drove away. He apparently had no sense that the cops had recognized him and Bonnie. It was just routine evasive action. He and Bonnie circled a few blocks, making certain the police car wasn’t still on their tail, and then returned to pick up Henry. But the moment Clyde and Bonnie drove away, Henry bolted from the Majestic Café, leaving a bewildered waitress wondering what she was supposed to do with the sandwiches and soft drinks she’d been about to hand over to her customer. Then Henry stole a car and drove to his cousin Willie Methvin’s house in Bienville Parish.
When Clyde and Bonnie got back to the Majestic Café and found Henry gone, they weren’t surprised or upset. Henry might have seen the police car, too, and hidden himself somewhere. He would certainly find his way back to Bienville Parish. At some point, they could reunite with him at his parents’ home. No one knows where Clyde and Bonnie spent the rest of the day. None of the Methvins mentioned seeing them again until Monday night.
Jeff Guinn Page 37