Jeff Guinn

by Untold Story of Bonnie;Clyde Go Down Together: The True

  When Cumie Barrow and Emma Parker were released from jail in late March, they were offered employment: Charles Stanley, the Crime Doctor, wanted them to tour the country with him and the Death Car. The Depression was still in full force, and the Barrows and Parkers needed any income they could get. Cumie and Emma signed on. Henry Barrow was hired by Stanley, too, along with the father of recently slain celebrity criminal John Dillinger. Marie Barrow and her husband, Joe Bill Francis, were brought along to handle ticket sales. During the programs, which were often held at county fairs, Stanley would present a slide show and then make a speech about the horrors of crime. Emma Parker, the Barrows, and John Dillinger Sr. would answer questions about their infamous children. The programs drew packed houses, but after a few weeks the combined toll of strenuous travel and reliving painful memories proved too much for Cumie and Emma. Along with Henry, Marie, and Joe Bill they dropped off the Crime Doctor’s tour and went home to Dallas. Cumie began writing her own memoir to counter Jan Fortune’s Fugitives, but the few dozen pages she managed were never published.

  Crime Doctor Charles Stanley’s show was a smash everywhere but in Frank Hamer’s hometown of Austin. Stanley was confronted there by Hamer and Manny Gault. It had been made public during Henry Methvin’s Oklahoma trial that the Methvin family set up Clyde and Bonnie to be ambushed, but that made little difference to Hamer. He stubbornly stuck to his version of events—the public had no right to know the identity of his informant. As Stanley performed his regular program onstage in Austin, discussing as usual how retired Texas Ranger captain Frank Hamer orchestrated the ambush with the help of the Methvin family, Hamer and Gault vaulted up beside him. The towering lawman roared, “I’m Frank Hamer,” and slapped Stanley across the face. Then he and Gault confiscated Stanley’s slides and warned him never to put on his show again.

  Stanley didn’t sue Hamer—in Texas, no jury would have found against the legendary lawman. But he didn’t obey Hamer and stop performing his program, either. He had a duplicate set of slides, which were mostly mug shots of Clyde and John Dillinger. When Stanley returned to Texas in the fall of 1939 for a performance at the State Fair in Dallas, he was concerned enough that Hamer might show up to hire two guards—Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton. There was no love lost between Hamer and the two Dallas County deputies. Alcorn and Hinton were ready for a confrontation, but Hamer never appeared.

  Stanley finally shut down the Death Car tour during the early 1940s. He had eventually purchased the Ford V-8 sedan from Ruth Warren, and in 1952 Stanley sold the car to a film producer who planned to make a movie about Depression-era criminals. The film was never produced, and after changing hands several more times the Ford ended up on display at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Primm, Nevada.

  Many of the people associated with Clyde and Bonnie didn’t have obvious scars like the bullet holes in the doors of the Death Car, but they were damaged all the same. One way or the other, their interaction with the criminal couple affected all of them for the rest of their lives.

  Frank Hamer never returned to active duty with the Texas Rangers. Instead he would occasionally sign on with oil companies as a special investigator to prevent illegal strikes and root out industrial sabotage. His reputation suffered somewhat after the Gibsland ambush—many people believed Clyde and Bonnie had not been given a genuine opportunity to surrender. But Hamer was still considered the ultimate gun-toting lawman. When Hamer visited Hollywood in 1940, Western film star Roy Rogers asked for his autograph. During the last few years of Hamer’s life he was debilitated following a case of heat stroke. He died in 1955 at the age of seventy-one.

  In 1937, Manny Gault was allowed to rejoin the Texas Rangers. He was promoted to captain, the same high rank his former boss Frank Hamer had once held, and died in 1947.

  A year after the Gibsland ambush, Henderson Jordan supplemented his salary as Bienville Parish sheriff by buying a half-interest in an Arcadia auction barn. His daughter claimed that her father’s hair turned white because of the trauma involved in killing Clyde and Bonnie. Jordan died in an automobile accident in 1958. He had been succeeded as Bienville Parish sheriff by Prentiss Oakley, who often admitted to friends that he fired prematurely on May 23, 1934. Oakley died unexpectedly in 1957.

  Bob Alcorn eventually left the Dallas County sheriff’s department and tried his hand at selling cars. When he tired of that, he became a Dallas County court bailiff. Alcorn died on May 23, 1964, the thirtieth anniversary of the ambush outside Gibsland.

  Ted Hinton resigned as a Dallas County deputy to run a trucking company and manage a motel in the Dallas suburb of Irving. The surviving members of the Barrow family came to consider him a trusted friend. Hinton acted as an intermediary between the Barrows and the press, passing along requests for interviews and usually reporting refusals. When Clyde’s younger brother, L.C., fell on hard times, Hinton helped out by hiring him as a truck driver. Both Hinton and Bob Alcorn made unsuccessful attempts to run for sheriff of Dallas County. They blamed their defeats in part on voters remembering, and resenting, that they’d shot Bonnie Parker. When Hinton died in 1977, he had been the last surviving ambush participant.

  Smoot Schmid never realized his dream of being elected governor of Texas. But he was reelected Dallas County sheriff until 1946. Then Schmid retired to take a seat on the state prison Board of Pardons and Parole. He died in 1963.

  Lee Simmons fared much worse. In September 1935 he resigned as prison general manager after a series of investigations revealed widespread corruption and mistreatment of inmates in the Texas prison system. Simmons entered private business and died in 1957.

  Several Barrow Gang partners didn’t outlive Clyde and Bonnie by very long. Joe Palmer was recaptured on June 15, 1934; he and Raymond Hamilton, who was already in custody, were both sentenced to die on “Old Sparky,” Texas’s infamous electric chair. On July 22 they managed a spectacular escape from the prison death house in Huntsville. Palmer was apprehended in August and Raymond was caught in April. They went to the electric chair on May 10, 1935. Palmer died first. With his last words, Raymond Hamilton denied killing John Bucher in Hillsboro on April 30, 1932. Then, as he was strapped into the chair, Raymond said “Well, goodbye, all.”

  W. D. Jones completed his prison term and moved to Houston. He developed addictions to drugs and alcohol. On the night of August 20, 1974, Jones went home with a woman he’d just met in a bar and was shot to death by her jealous boyfriend.

  Ralph Fults and Floyd Hamilton did much better. Both committed more crimes and served multiple prison terms in and out of Texas—Hamilton spent several years in an Alcatraz cell next to the legendary “Bird Man”—before finally finding religion and reinventing themselves as public service speakers and youth leaders. Floyd Hamilton died in 1984 and Ralph Fults in 1993.

  Henry Methvin was paroled from the Oklahoma state prison in McAlester on March 18, 1942. He returned home to Bienville Parish and worked there until the night of April 19, 1948, when, apparently drunk, he fell asleep on a railroad track and was cut in half by a Southern Pacific passenger train. Henry’s father, Ivy, died two years earlier in 1946 when he was struck by a car.

  The surviving Parkers and Barrows mostly found their post–Clyde and Bonnie lives blighted, too. Following her thirty-day prison term and short stint touring with Crime Doctor Charles Stanley, Emma Parker returned home to Dallas. She died in 1944 at age fifty-seven—physically and spiritually broken, friends were certain, by the tension and tragedy brought into her life by her beloved daughter Bonnie.

  Bonnie’s older brother, Buster, was also debilitated. Though he was never accused of having anything directly to do with the Barrow Gang’s crimes, the stigma still seemed to haunt him. Buster drank heavily and died in 1964. He was fifty-six.

  Billie Jean Parker, Bonnie’s little sister, served the year-and-a-day prison term she was assessed in the harboring trial and returned to Dallas. She remarried and raised her brother Buster’s daughter—the child was named Bonnie aft
er her infamous aunt. Billie Jean died in 1993.

  Henry and Cumie Barrow continued living in the family service station in West Dallas. Their daughter Marie and son-in-law Joe Bill Francis lived with them. On the night of September 4, 1938, Marie and her older brother L.C. got into a bar fight with former harboring trial codefendant Baldy Whatley, who trailed the Barrow siblings to the service station afterward and fired a shotgun into the house. The pellets struck Cumie in the face, permanently affecting her vision.

  In 1940, Henry sold the service station and used the proceeds to purchase a small house on Lawrence Street in Dallas. It was the first time the elder Barrows experienced the luxury of indoor plumbing. Cumie didn’t have long to enjoy a flush toilet. She died two years later in 1942 at age sixty-seven. Henry lived another fifteen years, dying at eighty-three in 1957. The Barrows are buried together beside the grave shared by their sons Buck and Clyde.

  The Barrows’ eldest son, Jack, survived his mother but not his father. Jack Barrow had always kept a distance from his outlaw younger brothers. He was determined to raise his four daughters free of the slightest criminal taint. But on October 14, 1939, Jack Barrow killed Otis Jenkins in a bar fight. The other Barrows swore that Jack was only defending himself, but he was sentenced to a short prison term. After his release, Jack came home to his family in Dallas. He died in 1947. Jack was fifty-two.

  Artie and Nell Barrow both escaped prosecution at the 1935 harboring trial and were the only surviving Barrow children to avoid future brushes with the law. Nell died in 1968 at age sixty-three, and Artie lived to age eighty-one before passing away in 1981.

  L.C. and Marie Barrow never escaped the influence of Clyde and Buck. L.C. served several prison terms for robbery and forgery. Records at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville indicate that L.C. claimed addictions to drugs and alcohol. But he eventually got his life in order and worked for several companies as a truck driver. L.C. mourned Clyde for the rest of his life. Sometimes, mention of his brother reduced him to tears. L.C. was sixty-six when he died in 1979.

  Marie divorced Joe Bill Francis and fell in with a series of criminal gangs. She spent time in prison, missing Cumie’s funeral in 1942 because she was incarcerated, but eventually moved back to Dallas and married ex-con Luke Scoma. The marriage lasted, and even thrived, though Scoma made his late-life living stealing lawn mowers from discount chain stores. In the 1990s, Marie met Dallas memorabilia collector-dealer Charles Heard, and arranged through him to sell Clyde’s remaining possessions. These included the shirt and pants he was wearing during the Gibsland ambush, his pocket watch, and the lever-action .22 rifle Clyde owned as a child. Heard bought the shirt from Marie for $35,000 and resold it for $75,000 to the same Nevada casino that owns the Death Car. Marie got $27,000 for Clyde’s rifle and $20,000 for the pocket watch. She and Heard then cut Clyde’s “death pants” into small swatches, mounted the bits of cloth on certificates attesting to their authenticity, and sold the swatches for $200 at museums and up to $500 at memorabilia auctions. When Marie gave the blue wool trousers to her new partner to cut into squares, Heard protested, “These couldn’t have been Clyde’s pants. They’re way too small, and the legs are too short.” Marie replied, “We were poor as church mice, so Mamma cut them down to fit one of the [grand]kids.” Heard looked closely at the garment. Despite its alterations and many washings, bloodstains were still clearly visible.

  In 1998 Marie began working with Dallas historian Jonathan Davis on a memoir she intended to contradict everything in Fugitives, but refused to allow the finished book to be published after deciding it didn’t portray the Barrow family in a sufficiently positive light. Marie began working on a new memoir with Arkansas writer Phillip Steele, but she died in February 1999 after they’d just begun collaborating. Steele went ahead with a book anyway, publishing The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde in 2000. In accordance with Marie’s wishes, this second memoir left out many details about Clyde and the rest of the Barrows that had been included in her original project with Jonathan Davis.

  But before Marie died, she and Billie Jean Parker rekindled their friendship—and welcomed the company of a third woman who’d survived all the Barrow Gang tribulations.

  On March 24, 1939, Blanche Caldwell Barrow was released from prison in Missouri. Blanche moved back to Texas, and in 1940 married a Dallas construction supervisor named Eddie Frasure. She never lost touch with the surviving Barrows, and after Frasure died in 1969, Blanche began visiting Marie Barrow on a regular basis. Marie in turn reintroduced Blanche to Billie Jean Parker, who was now married to Arthur Moon and preferred to be called simply “Jean.” Blanche and Jean Moon became such fast friends that Marie was jealous. The three women spent a great deal of time together in various combinations fishing, drinking beer, and reminiscing. A few years before her death from cancer in 1988, Blanche said that “I talk of these incidents [with Clyde and Bonnie] as if I were not a part of any of it, like a character in a book I once read.” By then, the terrifying misadventures that Blanche remembered—and wrote about in her posthumously published prison diary—had little in common with the image of Clyde and Bonnie that grew even more glamorous and glittering following their deaths.

  CHAPTER 42

  The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde

  Clyde and Bonnie were barely in their graves when Jan Fortune’s Fugitives reached bookstore shelves in the fall of 1934. Through the device of embellishing many of Nell Barrow’s and Emma Parker’s original comments, Fortune essentially presented Clyde as a hot-tempered, soliloquy-spouting philosopher and Bonnie as a high-spirited Southern belle. These caricatures reinforced the public’s perception of the couple as glamorous celebrity bandits who, though dead, remained reliable sources of entertainment.

  Hollywood thought so. In January 1937 Fritz Lang released You Only Live Once, with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney featured as a husband and wife engaging in increasingly violent crime after Fonda’s character is wrongly accused of murder during a bank robbery. The characters and plot were clearly based on Clyde and Bonnie, and the overall effect was to suggest they were well-meaning young people forced into killing by callous and/or incompetent lawmen. From the late 1930s through the 1950s, several other films—Persons in Hiding, Gun Crazy, They Live by Night—also presented one-dimensional interpretations of Clyde and Bonnie, focusing on overly dramatized gunplay or romance as dictated by the whims of the directors. The worst, by far, was 1958’s The Bonnie Parker Story, which depicts Bonnie as a sleazy femme fatale who seduces a series of lovers into committing criminal acts. In the film, Bonnie’s main love interest is Guy Darrow rather than Clyde Barrow. Identifying Bonnie by her real name and altering Clyde’s was indicative of a gradual reversal of their supposed roles in the mind of the public. By the 1950s, it had become fashionable to think of Bonnie rather than Clyde as the actual leader of the Barrow Gang—she was the kill-crazy criminal mastermind, and he was the love-struck minion.

  The impetus for this wildly inaccurate reappraisal came more from print than film. Inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s brilliant private eye fiction of the 1920s and early 1930s, a new generation of American writers including Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald wrote a flood of thriller novels in the 1940s and 1950s featuring dogged protagonists who cracked cases after refusing to succumb to the lethal charms of evil, law-breaking women. This fresh theme was welcomed by the true crime magazines whose supply of front-cover material had waned after the deaths of Clyde, Bonnie, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker. The concept of a sexy, calculating gun moll clearly captivated the public, and given the best-known alternative real-life option—no matter how malign the magazines might try to make her appear, Ma Barker was still a dumpy, middle-aged woman—Bonnie Parker was inevitably remolded into a sultry schemer. A typical story appeared in the March 1956 edition of Argosy magazine. “Killer in Skirts” included the subheading of “She was blonde and stacked and ninety pounds straight out of hell—tommy-gunning, stogy-smoking Bonnie Parker, Americ
a’s deadliest sweetheart.” Writer Marvin H. Albert described Bonnie as a “pretty blonde in [an] over-tight sweater” with the butt of an unlit cigar clenched between her teeth while “her arms lovingly cradled a submachine gun.” Bonnie, Albert wrote, “would shoot a man for no reason. That’s how she got her kicks.” The blitz of Bonnie-as-Clyde’s-manipulator stories was so ubiquitous and persuasive that even retired Dallas County deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton began telling friends that perhaps Bonnie had goaded Clyde into all that violence after all.

  And there public perception of Clyde and Bonnie stalled for another decade. They were conscienceless killers, she was probably the boss, and they wreaked a few years of colorful havoc before dying together in a final climactic gun battle. As the readership of true crime magazines declined, so did interest in Clyde and Bonnie. Like Charles Lindbergh and Jack Dempsey, they were icons from an American era that was no longer relevant to a public whose entertainment needs now were met with TV sitcoms and rock ’n’ roll. Fascination with them was mostly over.

  Blanche Caldwell Barrow Frasure certainly thought so. She enjoyed her new life with husband Eddie. They traveled a lot and were able to build a pleasant country home in the Dallas suburb of Seagoville after Eddie received a promotion at the architect’s business where he worked. Blanche’s reputation for running with the Barrow Gang seemed permanently in her past until 1965 when she was contacted by actor Warren Beatty. Beatty told Blanche that he had purchased the rights to a new screenplay about Clyde and Bonnie. This film, he said, would use their real names. Because they had been recognized celebrities, anyone could use them as characters in a movie. But Beatty wanted to pay Blanche for the right to use her name and character, too. Beatty met with Blanche and her lawyer and showed them the prospective script. It seemed fairly truthful to Blanche. She allowed the use of her name in the film, and was pleased to be paid enough to build a new fence around her property in Seagoville. Beatty said he’d play Clyde, an actress named Faye Dunaway would portray Bonnie, Buck would be played by Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons would take the role of Blanche. During 1966, some scenes in the movie were filmed around Dallas. L.C. Barrow visited the set, walked up to Beatty and Hackman and piped, “Howdy there, brothers!”