They know the law always wins
They’ve been shot at before, but they do not ignore
That death is the wages of sin.
Some day they’ll go down together
And they’ll bury them side by side
To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”
Beginning with his appointment to the case on February 10, Frank Hamer stalked every move that the remaining Barrow Gang made. One of the things he discovered was that they tended to move in a circular pattern along the states lines of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. By moving along state lines, they were able to avoid capture by local officers or highway patrolmen who could not cross state lines. Another thing that he noticed was that the gang tended to visit their families at regular intervals. According to his calculations, the next family due for a visit was Methvin’s family in Louisiana.
Because he had a set pattern of behavior, Hamer was able to anticipate his next move and plan accordingly. In mid-May, 1934, Hamer requisitioned a large number of Browning Automatic Rifles and 20 rounds of armor piercing bullets. Then, on May 21, he left Texas with four hand-picked posse members and traveled to Shreveport, Louisiana. There they waited until word reached them through their sources that the trio were heading to Bienville Parish. The three gang members agreed that, in case they became separated, they would meet on an abandoned stretch of highway near Methvin’s parents’ home. Methvin’s father became aware of this arrangement and, under increased pressure from the police, exchanged the information for a promise that his son would not receive the death penalty if captured.
The posse: standing: Ted Hinton, Prentiss Oakley, Manny Gault; seated: Bob Alcorn, Henderson Jordan and Hamer.
Hamer had chosen his posse well. In addition to himself, there was Ted Hinton, who knew Bonnie from her waitressing days, as well as Bob Alcorn, who knew Clyde on sight. There was also former Ranger Manny Gaul, Sheriff Henderson Jordan from Bienville, and his deputy, Prentiss Oakley. Together the men waited outside the rendezvous point on Highway 154 for the little group to show up.
At about 9:00 on the morning of May 23, 1934, the waiting posse heard a car fast approaching. Looking through the bushes they quickly identified it as the stolen Ford that Clyde had last been seen driving. It pulled up alongside Ivan Methvin’s truck, placed there by Hamer to attract Clyde’s attention and to place his car in the best position for the ambush. The five officers opened fire, spraying the Ford and its occupants with approximately 130 rounds of ammunition. According to interviews with Alcorn and Hinton:
It was about 9 a. m., when we finally sighted the car. It was a gray V-8 coach, and that was the car we were looking for. We had been waiting at the top of a steep hill, and the car had to slow down as it neared the top. There wasn’t any time to think. We didn’t have a minute to wonder if we were coming out alive. The name Clyde Barrow and all the terror and danger it involved didn’t mean a thing. There were two people in that car and they probably were Clyde and Bonnie. And that car was getting nearer.
There must have been a signal given, but “who it came from is another thing. We just all acted together, stepped out into the road and raised our guns. We all yelled “Halt!” at once.
They didn’t halt. The car was going slowly and Clyde let go of the wheel. We could see him grab at a gun in his lap. Bonnie was going for something on the other side.
Then all hell broke loose. There were six men shooting at once. Machine guns? No, thank God. We had shotguns and Browning automatics. We had tried machine guns once before….
You couldn’t hear any one shot. It was just a roar, a continuous roar, and it kept up for several minutes. We emptied our guns, reloaded and kept shooting. No chances with Clyde and Bonnie.
As we jumped into sight, I could see Clyde reaching as if to get his gun. But he never had a chance to fire a shot. Neither did Bonnie, though we learned a few minutes later that they both were carrying rifles across their laps.
Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols.
We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns.
After shooting the shotguns, we emptied the pistols at the car, which had passed us and ran into a ditch about 50 yards on down the road. It almost turned over. We kept shooting at the car even after it stopped. We weren’t taking any chances.
There was smoke coming from the car, and it looked like it was on fire. I guess this was caused when one of the shotguns Clyde or Bonnie had across their laps went off. They did not have time to raise their guns, but the tightening of their muscles as they were filled with lead might have pressed the trigger. The blast at close range almost tore off …the door.
We all ran up to the car. Ted opened the door on Bonnie’s side and she almost fell out.
She was sitting with her head down between her knees, bent over the gun that was in her lap. Her right hand had been shot away. She was also shot in the mouth, and I learned later that there were about 40 other bullet holes in her.
The door on Clyde’s side would not open. His head was hanging out the window. He too had a shotgun across his lap and a pistol in his hand. The back of his head was shot off.
Bob knew right away that we had at last got the right ones. He knew Clyde when the punk was stealing automobiles. He also knew Bonnie, who used to be a waitress near the courthouse. You can imagine how we felt. Our first thought was to tell the boss, Sheriff Smoot Schmid so we got to the nearest town as quickly as we could and telephoned.
‘Did you sleep good last night?’ Ted asked Smoot. ‘No, I didn’t.’ he answered. “Well, you can go on home and sleep now.” Ted told him. ‘We just killed em both.’ Smoot dropped the phone. Oakley meanwhile went back to Arcadia for the coroner. In the back of the car we found three machine rifles, two automatic shotguns, 10 automatic pistols and 1500 rounds of ammunition. There were a couple of magazines, a detective and a love story. In the seat beside Clyde and Bonnie was a bacon and lettuce sandwich.
Before we got back to the car, however, people just sprang up from everywhere.
Without removing the bodies, we hitched the car onto the back of a truck and towed it into Arcadia, where the bodies were taken to the undertakers. That little town was filled with cars and people.”
Among the people who “sprang from everywhere” were women who tried to cut of locks of Bonnie’s hair and pieces of her dress. Another man tried to cut off Clyde’s trigger finger while another went after his left ear. According to the official coroner’s report, Clyde was shot 17 times and Bonnie 26. Each had several headshots, any one of which would have killed them instantly. The undertaker reported having difficulty embalming the body because they were too full of holes to hold the embalming fluid.
Among the 12,000 people that rushed into the little town in the hopes of seeing a piece of history was one lone farmer with a sad, weather beaten face. Henry Barrow had been called in by the police to make an official identification of what was left of his son’s body. Afterwards he sat alone in the back of the furniture store where the bodies had been taken and wept. There was also a young man in his mid-20s, dress in a quiet suit. He was Buster Parker, and he was there to bring his sister’s body home.
Another person called in that day to help confirm the identities of the dead was H. D. Darby. The previous year, Bonnie and Clyde had stolen his car and kidnapped him and his girlfriend. Giddy and talkative with excitement, Bonnie had asked him what he did for a living. When he replied that he was an undertaker, she cackled with laughter and observed that perhaps one day he’d get to work on her. In fact he did, assisting Mr. McClure of McClure’s Funeral Parlor with preparing her body for burial.
Like their short lives, Bonnie and Clyde’s respective funerals got completely out of hand. Bonnie’s f
uneral, held at the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home in Dallas, was inundated with flowers, including arrangements that allegedly came from other “public enemies” such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. However, no bouquet was a large as the one from a group of Dallas news boys, who paid tribute to the woman whose death had allowed them to sell more than half a million papers in one day. 20,000 people showed up at the Fishtrap Cemetery for her burial, making it nearly impossible for the family to get to the gravesite.
Clyde’s funeral was private and held at the chapel of the Sparkman-Holtz-Brand Funeral Home in Dallas. He was buried in the Western Heights Cemetery, next to his brother, Buck. A single head stone marks both their graves and says, simply, “gone but not forgotten,” just as Clyde had earlier requested.
While this epitaph could not be more appropriate (no one who hears his story will ever forget Clyde Barrow,) it also could not be more poignant. As a young man, he was the fifth of a large, very poor family where there appears to have never been enough of anything, including attention, to go around. Desperate for adventure and money, he made the poor choice of breaking the law. However, the law in turn broke him. The cruelty of the Texas penitentiary system at that time turned a wayward boy into a hardened criminal, and the crimes perpetrated against him while he was in custody played a role in creating Clyde the murderer.
And what of Bonnie? What made a good student turn into a bad moll? For her, it seems that she never overcame the loss of her father at such an age. Good grades may have been her way of gaining family approval and affection until peer acceptance became more important. Then her bad marriage, built on the hope of finally having a man to count on soured her to the possibility of ever being a fully functioning adult and drove her instead toward a life of doing whatever felt good at the moment. She attached herself fully to Clyde, and when it became clear that he would likely die in a hail of bullets, she determined she wanted nothing less than that for herself. In the end, they both got what they wanted.
Chapter 9: The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde
To an extent, the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde signaled the apex of the “Public Enemies Era”, and in the next few months, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd would all be shot dead as well. To help prevent more public enemies, the federal government stepped up their efforts by making bank robbery and kidnapping federal offenses, thus allowing the FBI to get involved in those kinds of crimes.
By then, of course, Bonnie and Clyde had become legends, and their romance, whirlwind lives and ultimate fates made their story a natural on the silver screen. Within decades, Hollywood had depicted their story several times, books had been written, and musicians wrote songs referencing them. In 1967, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway added their starpower and striking good looks to the outlaws.
While their story is certainly worth telling, though perhaps not in the sensationalized, romantic way the criminals are often depicted, the portrayals of Bonnie and Clyde are (not surprisingly) often at odds with reality. Far from being swashbuckling, W.D. Jones described Clyde as a young, serious man with a small build:
I was in the joint when word came on May 23, 1934, that Clyde and Bonnie was killed near Arcadia, Louisiana. I’ve heard stories since that Clyde was homosexual, or, as they say in the pen, a “punk,” but they ain’t true. Maybe it was Clyde’s quiet, polite manner and his slight build that fooled folks.
He was only about five feet, six inches tall and he weighed no more than 135 pounds. Me and him was about the same size, and we used to wear each other’s clothes. Clyde had dark hair that was wavy. He never had a beard. Even when he didn’t shave, all he had on his chin was fuzz.
Another way that story might have got started was his wearing a wig sometimes when him and Bonnie had to drive through a town where they might be recognized. He wore the wig for disguise and for no other reason.
Clyde never walked right, either. He’d chopped off his big toe and part of the second toe on his left foot when he was in prison, because he couldn’t keep up, with the pace the farm boss set.
Or the story could have come from sensation writers who believed anything dropped on them and who blew it to proportions that suited their imagination.
Jones also described Clyde as both polite and even not above praying:
Clyde had good manners, just naturally. It fooled lots of folks, like that policeman in Missouri. We was driving over a bridge and the motor law rolled up beside us and told us to pull over, Clyde smiled and told him, “Just a minute, sir.”
It was night and Clyde wanted to get off that bridge before he stopped. But that policeman come on real nasty. “Stop right here now,” he said.
Clyde kept right on going and saying, “Just a minute, sir.” When we got off the bridge, Clyde turned up a little street and stopped. The policeman come up to the door. That’s when Clyde throwed that little shotgun in his face, and that law done a turn around.
Clyde liked to stay sharp and would sometimes hit the car brakes of a sudden, bounce out to the roadside and open up with that cutoff automatic rifle on a tree or a sign for practice. He was never more than an arm’s reach from a gun, even in bed, or out of bed on the floor in the night, when he thought we was all asleep and couldn’t see him kneeling there. I seen it more than once. He prayed. I reckon he was praying for his soul. Maybe it was for more life. He knowed it would end soon, but he didn’t intend for it to be in jail.
Fittingly, it was Jones who dispelled much of the myth-making surrounding the two in his interview with Playboy shortly after the popular 1967 movie about Bonnie and Clyde. “That Bonnie and Clyde movie made it all look sort of glamorous, but like I told them teenaged boys sitting near me at the drive-in showing: ‘Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell.’”
Clyde and Jones
The Trail’s End
You’ve read the story of Jesse James
of how he lived and died.
If you’re still in need;
of something to read,
here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
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 as ruthless as that.
their nature is raw;
they hate all the law,
the stool pidgeons, spotters and rats.
They call them cold-blooded killers
they say they are heartless and mean.
But I say this with pride
that I once knew Clyde,
when he was honest and upright and clean.
But the law fooled around;
kept taking him down,
and locking him up in a cell.
Till he said to me;
“I’ll never be free,
so I’ll meet a few of them in hell”
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 till 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.
From heart-break some people have suffered
from weariness some people have died.
But take it all in all;
our troubles are small,
till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in Dallas
and they have no clue or guide.
If they can’t find a fiend,
they just wipe their slate clean
and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There’s two crimes committed in America
not accredited to the Barrow mob.
They had no hand;
in the kidnap demand,
nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his buddy;
“I wish old Clyde would get jumped.
In these awfull hard times;
we’d make a few dimes,
if five or six cops would get bumped”
The police haven’t got the report yet
but Clyde called me up today.
He said,"Don’t start any fights;
we aren’t working nights,
we’re joining the NRA.”
From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
is known as the Great Divide.
Where the women are kin;
and the men are men,
and they won’t “stool” on Bonnie and Clyde.
If they try to act like citizens
and rent them a nice little flat.
About the third night;
they’re invited to fight,
by a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat.
They don’t think they’re too smart or desperate
they know that the law always wins.
They’ve been shot at before;
but they do not ignore,
that death is the wages of sin.
Some day they’ll go down together
they’ll bury them side by side.
To few it’ll be grief,
to the law a relief
but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.
Suicide Sal
The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws Page 14