The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws

by Charles River Editors

  Before many months passed, Clyde was arrested again when he and his brother Buck stole some turkeys. They were not convicted, probably due to their poverty and age, and they soon obtained paying jobs. Nevertheless, they persisted in augmenting their meager honest earnings by stealing cars and robbing stores. As a result, Clyde was arrested several more times until, in April 1930, he was eventually sent to Eastham Prison Farm. Eastham had a reputation throughout the state for its dangerous conditions and heavy workloads. It was designed to punish hardened male criminals by making them spend most of their waking hours working in the hot Texas sun.

  For Clyde, it wasn’t the hot days that were the problem; it was the dark nights when his cellmate would repeatedly rape him. When he could take the abuse no longer, he beat the man to death, thus committing his first murder at the age of 21. By the time he got out of prison the following year, his own sisters barely recognized the hardened criminal their brother had become. His sister Marie later noted, “Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn’t the same person when he got out.” That was seconded by Ralph Fults, an inmate at Eastham, who said Clyde changed “from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake.”

  Chapter 3: The Couple

  “The road was so dimly lighted

  There were no highway signs to guide

  But they made up their minds if all roads were blind

  They wouldn’t give up ‘til they died.

  The road gets dimmer and dimmer

  Sometimes you can hardly see

  But it’s fight man to man, and do all you can

  For they know they can never be free.”

  In January 1930, Bonnie lost her job at the diner and left her mother’s house to stay with a friend in West Dallas who had a broken arm and needed help around the house. One day, while she was in the kitchen making hot chocolate, there was a knock at the door. Her friend called for the person to come in, and Clyde Barrow stepped into the cramped little living room. Coming out of the kitchen to see who was visiting, Bonnie came face to face with the man of her dreams. Though not yet a hardened criminal, Barrow already had a number of crimes under his belt, and he would soon be sent away to Eastham. While he was gone, Bonnie remained faithful to him, building up in her mind a fantasy of the romantic adventures the two of them would enjoy when he got out.

  Thus, she ready to join what became known as “The Barrow Gang,” which Clyde formed soon after leaving Eastham in February 1932. Armed with an M1919 Browning Automatic Rifle, Clyde was soon out robbing small grocery stores and gas stations. His goal, along with that of his friend Ralph Fults, was to gather enough money and guns to stage a retaliatory raid on Eastham Prison, whom Clyde held responsible for his sexual assaults and other mistreatment. If they could break out other prisoners, all the better.

  Bonnie soon earned her place in the group, being captured on April 19 after a failed burglary against a hardware store. She was kept for a few months in Kaufman County jail in Texas until June 17, when the grand jury decided not to indict her because of her youth and previous clean record. Instead, they released her with a stern warning to stay out of trouble in the future. Instead, she quickly returned to Clyde and a life of crime.

  However, Ralph Fults, who had been arrested with her, had been convicted and given a much longer sentence. He was never involved with the gang again, but Bonnie and Clyde carried on without him. By this time, Clyde was wanted for the murder of J. N. Bucher, the owner of a store he robbed in Hillsboro, Texas, on April 30, 1932. In actuality, Clyde was probably an accomplice who waited behind the wheel of the getaway car during that robbery, but he would have plenty of blood on his hands soon enough.

  Chapter 4: The Barrow Gang

  “Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow Gang,

  I’m sure you all have read

  how they rob and steal and those who squeal

  are usually found dying or dead.

  There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups

  They’re not so ruthless as that

  Their nature is raw, they hate all law

  Stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.”

  In August 1932, Bonnie left the gang long enough to visit her mother in Dallas, and while she was gone, Clyde, along with Raymond Hamilton and Ross Dyer, attended a barn dance just across the Texas state line in Stringtown, Oklahoma. They were sitting outside the dance, drinking, when Stringtown Sheriff C. G. Maxwell and his deputy, Eugene Moore, approached them to find out what they were doing. Though there is no evidence to indicate that either man knew anything about who they were, Barrow still saw a uniform, and that’s all it took. He and Hamilton fired on both men, killing Moore. Though Maxwell was seriously injured, he was able to survive the attack and describe the two shooters.

  High with a sense of having struck out against authority, Barrow quickly attacked again, this time killing a storekeeper who didn’t give up the $28 in his cash register quickly enough. This October 11 robbery, which took place in Sherman, Texas, was yet another example of the escalating violence in the gang’s tactics.

  On Christmas Eve 1932, 16 year old W. D. Jones became the youngest member of the Barrow gang. A family friend for years, Jones already had a criminal record and naturally looked up to the bad boy Clyde and wanted to be like him. He rode out of Dallas with them that night, and in an interview with Playboy decades later, he described what happened on Christmas Day.

  I had got with Clyde and Bonnie the night before in Dallas. Me and L. C., that’s Clyde’s younger brother, was driving home from a dance in his daddy’s old car. Here come Bonnie and Clyde. They honked their car horn and we pulled over. I stayed in the car. L. C. got out and went back to see what they wanted. Then he hollered at me, “Hey, come on back. Clyde wants to talk to you.” Clyde was wanted then for murder and kidnaping, but I had knowed him all my life. So I got out and went to his car.

  He told me, “We’re here to see Momma and Marie.” (That’s Clyde’s baby sister.) “You stay with us while L. C. gets them.’’ I was 16 years old and Clyde was only seven years older, but he always called me “Boy.”

  Them was Prohibition days and about all there was to drink was home-brew. That’s what me and L. C. had been drinking that Christmas Eve and it was about all gone. Clyde had some moonshine in his car, so I stayed with him, like he said, while L. C. fetched his folks. They lived just down the road in back of the filling station Old Man Barrow run.

  After the visiting was over, Clyde told me him and Bonnie had been driving a long ways and was tired. He wanted me to go with them so I could keep watch while they got some rest. I went. I know now it was a fool thing to do, but then it seemed sort of big to be out with two famous outlaws. I reckoned Clyde took me along because he had knowed me before and figured he could count on me.

  It must have been two o’clock Christmas morning when we checked into a tourist court at Temple. They slept on the bed. I had a pallet on the floor.

  Next morning, I changed two tires on that Ford Clyde had. Clyde really banked on them Fords. They was the fastest and the best, and he knew bow to drive them with one foot in the gas tank all the time. We went into town and stopped around the comer from a grocery store.

  Clyde handed me an old .41-caliber thumb buster and told me, “Take this, boy, and stand watch while I get us some spending money.” Later, I found out that gun wouldn’t shoot because there was two broken bullets stuck inside the chamber. I had to punch them out with a stick.

  I stood outside the store while Clyde went in. Bonnie was waiting in the car around the corner. After he got the money, we walked away toward Bonnie. Now, the blocks in them days was longer than they are now; and before we got halfway back to the car, Clyde stopped alongside a Model A roadster that had the keys in it. I don’t know if he’d seen something over his shoulder that spooked him or what. But he told me, “Get in that car, boy, and start it.” I jumped to it.
But it was a cold day and the car wouldn’t start. Clyde got impatient. He told me to slip over and he’d do it. I scooted over. About then an old man and an old woman run over to the roadster and began yelling, “That’s my boy’s car! Get out!” Then another woman run up and began making a big fuss. All the time, Clyde was trying to get it started. He told them to stand back and they wouldn’t get hurt. Then the guy who owned it run up. Clyde pointed his pistol and yelled, “Get back ‘ man, or I’ll kill you.” That man was Doyle Johnson, I learned later. He came on up to the car and reached through the roadster’s isinglass window curtains and got Clyde by the throat and tried to choke him.

  Clyde hollered, “Stop, man, or I’ll kill you.” Johnson didn’t move, and Clyde done what he had threatened. About then he got the car started and we whipped around the corner to where Bonnie was waiting. We piled into her car and lit a shuck out of town.

  It all seemed pointless then as to why Clyde wanted that car. I’ve thought about it since, and I figure he must have wanted the laws to think we was in Johnson’s car. Of course, he didn’t have no way of knowing he was gonna have to kill Johnson.

  We headed out of town toward Waco. A mile or two down the road, Clyde pulled over and said, “Boy, shinny up that pole and cut them phone wires. We don’t want no calls ahead.” I done it and we went on.

  As I look back, cutting them phone wires was slick. That was about all you had to do to cut off the law in them days. There wasn’t no two-way radio hookups like now; and when a police used them long-distance phone wires to call the next town, it run up expenses. Them was hard times and even towns didn’t have much to spend. There wasn’t as many laws then, either, and they just couldn’t catch up with Clyde in them V8 Fords he drove. Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn, the Dallas lawmen I come to know a year later, told me Clyde was about the best driver in the world. They said them Fords and Clyde’s driving was what kept him and Bonnie free them two years. Hell, I knowed that. I rode with him. He had me drive some when he was tired, but Clyde stayed behind the’ wheel when the heat was close. He believed in a nonstop jump in territory — sometimes as much as 1000 miles —whenever it got hot behind. He and Bonnie didn’t in- tend to ever be taken alive. They was hell-bent on running till the end, and they knowed there was only one end for them. Sometimes I thought Clyde liked the running. He dreaded getting caught, but he never give up robbing to work for a living. I reckon Clyde just didn’t want to work like other folks. For one thing, he never liked getting his hands dirty.

  27 year old Doyle Johnson was a new father who was on his way home for Christmas dinner. Though Jones claimed Clyde shot Johnson, accounts of the shooting claimed the firing came from the passenger side, implicating Jones. According to Jones, those accounts gave Clyde all he needed to ensure Jones had to stay with the gang, and Clyde told the youngster, “Boy, you can’t go home. You got murder on you, just like me.”

  Regardless of who pulled the trigger, the pair stole Johnson’s car and drove it to Tarrant County, where, two weeks later, they killed Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis. Like Doyle Johnson, Davis was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had been staking out a quiet part of town waiting for another wanted criminal when Clyde and Jones came upon the scene accidentally. The murder of Deputy Sheriff Davis was Clyde’s 5th killing since his February 1932 release, and he had been involved in the grave wounding of another officer as well.

  1931 mugshot of 15 year old William Daniel Jones. Jones and his friend L.C. Barrow were arrested after stealing and crashing a car.

  In late March 1933, Clyde’s brother Buck was finally released from prison after having been given a full pardon by the governor of Texas. He and his wife, Blanche, moved in with Bonnie, Clyde and Jones at 3347 ½ Oakridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri. They lived a quiet life and might well indeed have escaped notice and arrest but for the group’s insistence on regularly hosting noisy card games that went until all hours of the night and were fueled by the newly legalized beer available with the end of Prohibition. The group routinely went through as much as a case of beer each evening, and during one particularly rowdy party, Clyde accidentally shot off his rifle, causing the neighbors to complain to the local police force.

  Buck and Blanche Barrow

  Believing that they were only dealing with a bunch of rowdy citizens, five police officers surrounded the garage apartment on April 13, 1933, but when they called for those inside to come out with their hands up, everyone except Blanch came out shooting. They killed Detective McGinnis on the spot, while Constable Harryman later died of his wounds. Then, with Bonnie providing cover fire, the men jumped in the car and got it started. They swung by to grab Bonnie and then headed down the street after Blanche, who had gone after Snow Ball, her little white dog.

  The Joplin hideout

  When the dust settled, one officer had a face full of splinters from wood thrown at him by Bonnie’s shooting, one officer was dead, another was dying and two had escaped uninjured. Of the gang, young Jones was the most seriously injured, having been shot in the side. Buck was bleeding from where a ricocheted bullet grazed him and Clyde had a bullet hole in his suitcase.

  What the group left behind proved to be much more important to the legend than anything they took with them. The police found confirming evidence of all involved, including Buck and Blanche Barrow’s marriage licens,e as well as his three week old parole papers. They also found a significant collection of guns and a camera with several rolls of undeveloped film. Most interesting of all, they found the poem “Suicide Sal,” which had been written by Bonnie.

  16 year old W.D. Jones posing

  Because they had no photo lab of their own, the police took the film to the local paper, The Joplin Globe, for development. As a result, a full page story soon ran featuring a cigar smoking Bonnie holding a pistol, Clyde and Buck playing around while pointing guns at each other, a host of other salacious pictures of the two couples, and Bonnie’s poem “Suicide Sal.” The newly formed newswire service picked up the story, and “The Barrow Gang” became front page news all over the country. Jones explained the origins of the photos that made the gang famous:

  Bonnie smoked cigarettes, but that cigar bit folks like to tell about is phony. I guess I got that started when. I gave her my cigar to hold when I was making her picture. I made most of them pictures the laws picked up when we fled Joplin, Missouri, leaving everything in the apartment except the guns. I seen a lot of them pictures in the newspapers afterward — Them little poems Bonnie made up made the papers, too. She would think up rhymes in her head and put them down on paper when we stopped. Some of them she kept, but she threw a lot of them away.

  Chapter 5: Celebrities

  Bonnie and Clyde were probably certain of their ultimate fate, but they almost certainly relished their fame and publicity at the same time. In April 1934, Henry Ford received a letter purportedly authored by Clyde thanking the famous car maker for producing Clyde’s favorite kind of car:

  Mr. Henry Ford

  Detroit Mich.

  Dear Sir: —

  While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8 —

  Yours truly

  Clyde Champion Barrow

  While it’s still unclear whether Clyde actually wrote that letter, historians and analysts believe that the spelling errors can be explained by his lack of education, and there’s no doubt Clyde was a big fan of the V-8. Others believe that the handwriting of the letter resemble Bonnie’s handwriting. Of course, if Clyde didn’t author it, the letter was a clear example of Clyde’s notoriety, and a short time afterward Ford received a letter purported to be from John Dillinger (though the Dillinger letter was later prov
en to be a fraud).

  However, the publicity came at a cost. With the published photos plastering their faces on newspapers across the nation, it became more and more dangerous for anyone from the gang to appear in public. For that reason, the gang was constantly on the move, and over the next three months they worked their way from Texas to Minnesota, stopping along the way in Lucerne, Indiana in May to try to rob a bank. Though they failed in that job, they succeeded a little while later in Okabena, Minnesota. As a result of their frequent travels, the Barrow Gang got credit for crimes they didn’t actually commit, while false sightings in places they were far away from also became common. Jones recounted one example:

  Some of the tales about us robbing banks all the time ain’t true, either. The time I was with Clyde and Bonnie, we never made a bank job. He liked grocery stores, filling stations and places there was a payroll. Why should we rob a bank? There was never much money in the banks back in them days in the Southwest. But that’s not the way the papers put it. They’d write we was heisting a bank in Texas when we was actually off in Tennessee or somewhere else. I remember one time we stopped at a tourist court in a little town. I went across the road to an inn to get some sandwiches. The waiter was all excited. “Bonnie and Clyde was just here,” he told me. “They stopped for gas. The police come out, but they got here too late. Bonnie and Clyde was already gone and they couldn’t catch them.” It shook me some when he said that, but I stayed calm.