by John Gilmore
Henry spoke up. “I don’t smell any shit, but their faces turned white as a fuckin’ virgin’s bedsheet.”
Clyde shifted gears and sped ahead. Glancing through the mirror at Henry, he said, “That’s what I wanted to do with those Grapevines. Just run ’em around, havin’ some fun.”
Henry’s eyes met Clyde’s. “Just a misunderstandin’,” he said. “We all make some of those misunderstandin’s. I guess a body can blame God for ever creatin’ the likes of us.”
Forty
Between two and three o’clock in the morning, Clyde turned off Highway 66 onto a muddy dirt road running west from the highway. They were a short distance from Commerce, Oklahoma.
Henry said, “I’m awake, so you go on to sleep. She’s already asleep isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Clyde said.
“I’ll keep my eyes open but there’s nothin’.”
An hour and a half later, Bonnie squeezed Clyde’s arm. “He’s sleepin’.”
Clyde tipped the rearview mirror. “Stupid shit said he was awake. Coulda had our heads blown off.”
“Go to sleep if you want,” she said. “It’s all mud here. We’re sittin’ in mud.”
“You go on back to sleep, honey. I’ll wake him soon as I want to take it easy.”
“Sleep all you want ’cause I’m not shuttin’ my eyes.”
Clyde squeezed her hand and closed his eyes. When he opened them again the sun was shining, then dimming behind heavy cloud cover. Henry was slumped to the right side of the rear seat, and Bonnie was looking at her lips in her compact mirror. “He woke up,” she said. “There’s cars on the highway.”
“I heard ’em,” Clyde said, looking at her.
Her glance shot above the mirror. “Here they come!” she said.
Clyde instantly turned the key and started the engine. The laws’ car had stopped, heading on the side road, and was blocking any passage. The doors opened and two laws stepped into the mud. Clyde threw the car into reverse and sped backwards a distance, then tried to make a turn, but he skidded, the rear wheels sliding in the mud.
“Son of a bitch!” he said. He tried to go forward but they were stuck.
Henry said, “Bastards’re comin’.” The older-looking law was heading for Clyde’s car, unsnapping the holster, his fingers gripping the gun. The younger one had started back towards the cop’s car but as soon as he saw the older one with his gun drawn, he started coming as well, trudging in the mud, getting his own gun out. The older law was yelling something at Clyde and then started crouching as he saw the barrel of the automatic rifle Henry was thrusting out the rear window. The laws fired twice—one bullet hitting the front fender, the other creasing the car door as Clyde swung it open and jumped out, followed by Henry who fired again as Clyde shot two rounds toward the other car. The younger law fired several shots, two going through the windshield. Both Clyde and Henry kept firing until the law staggered, clutching at his head, then fell in front of the car. He raised one hand as if to wave.
“Don’t fire again!” Clyde told Henry. “You go get their guns, and bring these two to the car. We’re takin’ them soon as we get this fuckin’ car outta of the mud.”
Bonnie said, “Those people are all lookin’ at us, they’re comin’ out of those houses to see what’s goin’ on.”
The old guy was dead. Henry shrugged, left him lying, picked up the law’s .38 and stuck it into his own belt. He walked carefully to the other one, whose head was bleeding. “Let loose of that pistol and get up,” he told him. He pulled the law to his feet and started back to the car.
“Hurry it up!” Clyde called. “We got an audience—all these yokels. Give ’em five minutes and we’ll have fuckin’ militia on our necks.” He looked at the law’s wound. “Just glanced off your head,” he said. “You’re okay. Get in back and push this car outta the mud. You push it, Henry.” Clyde got back behind the wheel, started the car and tried to pull ahead.
“We’re just slippin’ around deeper,” Henry said. ‘Give it more gas and we’ll be gettin’ nowhere.”
Taking the shotgun out of the car, Clyde told Bonnie, “Get behind the wheel, see if you get it out while I run over to that house and get somethin’ to pull us.”
A few minutes later, Clyde returned with a pickup truck he’d convinced the owner to loan him, and a long, sturdy rope. It didn’t work. The rope broke. Another car pulled off the highway onto the dirt road. Soon as Clyde saw it wasn’t the law, he enlisted the driver to get behind the car with the law and Henry, and push the car out of the mud.
Frantic to get the car moving, Clyde went onto the highway, waving the shotgun and enlisting others to the task. One man in another truck had a sturdy chain, which he attached to the car, and in moments had it freed. The cop with the bleeding head was moved into the backseat along with Henry, and Clyde sped for the highway.
Bonnie opened their first-aid kit and bandaged the cop’s flesh wound. She asked his name and he said, “It’s Percy Boyd. I’m a cop with the Commerce Police Department, but I don’t think I’ll be gettin’ any medals for today’s job.”
“Sure you will,” Bonnie said. “They’ll be writin’ about you in the newspapers. Isn’t every day someone gets taken for a ride by Clyde Barrow.”
Boyd said, “I thought that’s who he is.”
Henry nodded. “That’s who he is.”
The cop looked at Bonnie. “You must be Bonnie....”
“That’s me! But I don’t smoke any cigars. When the newspapers are talkin’ to you, you’ll tell them you’re sendin’ a message from Bonnie Parker, and I’m not any kind of cigar-smokin’ person. That was just a gag ’cause we were all takin’ pictures. Bein’ funny like we’re real desperados.”
“Aren’t you?” Boyd asked.
“If we were real desperados, like John Dillinger,” Bonnie said, “you probably wouldn’t be ridin’ with us. Nobody would’ve missed and skinned your head instead of blowin’ your brains out.”
Boyd cleared his throat. “Dillinger said he sure knows how to pick a good car. How fast you goin’ now?”
Clyde said, “We’re doin’ ninety. Only three thousand miles on this one.”
“You’re sure a good driver,” Boyd said.
“Gotta be,” Clyde said. “If you’re on the move all day and all night of every fuckin’ day and night.”
“I know,” Boyd said. “We had no idea who was in this car. Got a call that it was sittin’ all night with you all in it. Nobody knew who you were, just seein’ the car sittin’ there. Cal Campbell, the guy you shot, he knew right away who you were. Every state in the country must know who you are—there’s four or five states lookin’ for you all the time.”
“I’m sorry about that old fella gettin’ shot,” Clyde said. “But this is a war and you kill or get killed. There ain’t nothin’ personal in it. He might’ve been a nice a guy as anyone.”
Boyd said, “All that recent shootin’ at Grapevine’s got the whole state lookin’ for you.”
“We didn’t have anythin’ to do with that shootin’. Newspapers blamed us and you’re damn right about the laws on us.”
“What about the shootin’ in Joplin?” Boyd asked. “Everyone keeps talkin’ about that.”
“That’s what I was tellin’ you,” Clyde said. “It was the laws’ fault for not runnin’ off. They didn’t have to be there. It was an attack, and I told you it’s a war. You shoot or get shot.”
They reached Fort Scott, Kansas, and Clyde sent Henry to buy newspapers and dinners. They gave Boyd a new shirt and one of Clyde’s ties. Clyde wanted to give him a new suit, but it would’ve been too small for Boyd.
A little later that night, Clyde stopped the car a few miles south of Fort Scott. He said, “Here’s where we’re lettin’ you out.” Bonnie gave Boyd a ten-dollar bill, and Clyde told him, “Stay right here till we’re behind that hill out there yonder. Gets us a little space between all those other boys out chasin’ after us.”
Bo
nnie said, “Promise me you’re gonna tell the newspapers I don’t smoke cigars. They got that gag picture and won’t stop sayin’ I’m a cigar-smokin’ hellcat. But if you tell ’em, they’ll believe it. You’ve spent a whole day and way late ridin’ and eatin’ with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and one of their friends. Will you do that?”
Forty-One
In 1985, I was put in contact with Evon Russo, a retired officer who’d worked with the Louisiana State Police and a former deputy of Bienville Parish, where he had been raised. He’d known the Methvin family. “Other Methvins were scattered throughout the parish,” Russo said over beer and crawfish at Papa John’s Restaurant in Lake Charles. “Not necessarily kin,” he told me. “Later I was spendin’ time in Ashland, not far from Henry’s Methvin’s folks, and I got to know about Henry doin’ time in Texas—least ’til Clyde Barrow busted him out and a few others, all pretty rock-bottom bad guys.” In his early 70s when we talked, the ex-deputy said he’d been “a couple years” older than Henry, and knew they were robbing banks and running with Clyde and Bonnie, “creatin’ general hell,” he said.
He became aware of a “stakeout” taking place in Bienville in the fall of 1934, “hushed up,” he says, as it was related to capturing Clyde Barrow and “whoever was left of the gang he’d busted out. It was also clear,” he said, “that Henry was the last of the ‘hombres’ left to be runnin’ with Clyde.”
Texas newspapers set the pace for what was to happen. Massive coverage of the Grapevine killings, offering two “eyewitness” accounts, were laying blame squarely on “a drunken Bonnie Parker, staggering to one officer wounded on the ground and emptying a shotgun into his body. Bonnie laughing as she fired, saying his head ‘bounced on the road like a rubber ball.’”
The waves of sensational publicity were indelibly casting Bonnie as the maniacal murderess of the two highway patrolmen at Grapevine, labeling her a “whiskey-belting, cigar-smoking, bloodthirsty she-devil.” Though the stories were untrue, and both so-called “eyewitnesses” were ultimately discredited, the sensational publicity influenced the attitudes of government and law enforcement. When the Texas Rangers were consulted, Captain Frank Hamer said he’d read that Bonnie Parker personally had taken part in the murder spree of nine peace officers. He said he could not substantiate the information since there had never been correct murder warrants issued for Bonnie. For Clyde? Yes.
The furor reached fever-pitch with a bounty placed on Bonnie’s head for her perceived role in the “bloodthirsty killings.” Popular perception turned even further against her and Clyde when only five days following the Grapevine killings, Henry Methvin killed a sixty-year-old single father, Constable Cal Campbell, secretly blaming the murder on Clyde “with Bonnie at his side.” Henry elaborated to his parents in Bienville that Bonnie “thought it was funny the way the old man’s legs kicked as he was dying. But don’t tell anyone I told you or Clyde’ll find out I said it and kill me.”
Bonnie and Clyde had kidnapped the city’s chief of police, Percy Boyd, wounded in the same shooting, and drove for many hours, finally into Kansas where they let him go. During Boyd’s conversation with the two, Clyde said he felt “bad about the old man gettin’ killed,” but did not indicate that he had pulled the trigger.
Chief Boyd told a reporter, “Bonnie was very good to me, took care of the bullet wound I’d got in my scalp, cleaned me up and Clyde gave me a clean shirt, even offered a suit but it was too small. I played it smart with those two, dug a little into their doin’s and got them goin’ over some of the activities. Soon as they freed me, what their talkin’ openly did was to get their names on top of the murder warrants for Campbell’s death, issued against Barrow and Parker, and with a third warrant for John Doe, as we didn’t know yet who that third party was.”
Russo says, “It was figured pretty quick that Henry Methvin was that third party, and the actual shooter of the constable.”
In February 1934, the attorney general in Washington, D.C., notified the Department of Justice to utilize every effort possible to apprehend Clyde Barrow and associates. “The activities of Barrow and associates constitute an open defiance of the power of our law enforcement agencies.”
Captain Frank Hamer had been summoned from retirement by Lee Simmons, head of the Texas State Prison systems who was infuriated over Barrow’s bust-out of the Eastham farm crooks and killers. He had Hamer establish a separate post for himself: Special Escape Investigator for the Texas Prison System. His task, according to Simmons, was to “put Barrow on the spot and kill everyone else with him.”
Hearing peripherally of the “plan,” Evon quickly was in touch with a deputy of Bienville who told him the “subject’s locked down tight.” He said any word Evon might hear would have to come from Deputy Prentiss Oakley, or from the sheriff himself.
On that beer and crawfish afternoon in the summer of ’85, Russo told me, “Of course, Oakley wasn’t goin’ to tell me any news, though what it had to do with was Ivy Methvin, Henry’s dad, seekin’ to make a deal to get Henry a pardon from Texas so he’d never have to see Eastham again. The old man got word to the sheriff that his son would kill himself if he had to go back to prison. “Henry said they’re gonna put him in the hole and he’d never see sunlight again,” Evon says. The try for a pardon wasn’t out of the question since the governor of Texas had to sign the pardon, and Governor Miriam Ferguson was handing out pardons like candy. She’d earned the title ‘The Pardon Queen,’ and had been the cause of more than one devoted lawman taking an early retirement over her leniency on cons.
Evon says, “Later, I found out what was cookin’, what Henry had to offer for a pardon, and that was his willingness to set up Clyde and Bonnie—betray them. That’s how it worked. It went on for weeks, layin’ the plan. Sheriff Henderson Jordan organized it with the Texas sheriff of Dallas county for Captain Frank Hamer to be runnin’ the show....”
W.D. later learned the truth about Henry’s betrayal. “Just like Judas,” W.D. said, “he made his choice of goin’ to the Romans to save his ass. Henry’s chunk of silver was a Texas pardon for all the killin’s his mangy hide had done in Texas.”
“News about Barrow and Bonnie,” Evon says, “runnin’ loose and the failure of the law to stop them was widespread. Folks were jokin’ that Clyde was in league with the Devil—nobody could nail him. He was smarter than they were, too fast for local boys, and clever as a fox. He’d swiped hundreds of cars over a two-year period, changin’ automobiles as fast some folks changin’ their socks. He didn’t shed a clue for the law to track. Stories about ’em were turnin’ into legends as they were still on the run—some even swearin’ ol’ Clyde was bulletproof ’cause he’d outrun ’em even on foot. If he got hit, they’d swore he’d cut the bullet out, suck it like fixin’ a snake bite and keep on runnin’ till he’d disappear. ’Course, he couldn’t disappear, but he’d be gone—leavin’ the law with its jaws hangin’ open.”
Catching Clyde seemed an impossibility, even with Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Missouri all chasing him. Nothing said “Dead or Alive” for Bonnie. She had no substantiated murder warrants out on her. “There were those sayin’ she’d never fired a gun at anyone,” Evon says, “and her only crime on record was transportin’ a hot automobile across a state line—Clyde drivin’, of course—and that wasn’t any hangin’ offense for her.
“Meanwhile, Henry’s shittin’ his pants at gettin’ jugged back in Eastham. He was still runnin’ with Barrow, but I imagine lookin’ the other way whenever they got face to face.”
Though Texas was yet ignorant of Henry’s involvement in the Grapevine killings, the stakeout in Bienville Parish moved to “ambush” priority under Frank Hamer.
Half a dozen lawmen, including Sheriff Henderson Jordan and his deputy, Oakley, formed the inter-jurisdictional posse. Someone mentioned a roadblock, but that idea was cancelled out, along with dogs. “Barrow wasn’t gettin’ into any woods to run his ass off,” one of the men said. “He’d smell hounds a
mile up the road and the roadblock’ll never see him.”
According to Russo, “One of the six in the squad later told me they’d hide in the brush with the trees at their back, and remain crouching down on the higher shoulder of the road. They couldn’t be seen from the road, even if you knew they were somewhere there and were lookin’. Hamer believed you couldn’t reason with Barrow and if Bonnie was with him, no murder warrants on her wasn’t goin’ to make a difference. If push came to shove, the men believed she’d make a grab for a shotgun.
“There were questions of seeing a way of getting Bonnie separated from Clyde, but finally one had to face the fact: there wasn’t any way. It would be rough if Clyde wouldn’t surrender and aimed to shoot it out. Bonnie’d be in the line of return fire. The men believed they had no choice but to do what was necessary and demanded of them.
“One Texas lawman later told me, ‘Way down on that empty dirt road runnin’ through the forests, we made do with where we’d settled. The heat was awful and bugs raided every second. It was enough to make you crazy, and maybe we were, as it turned out. No one was volunteerin’ to go out on that road to block Barrow’s way or tell him he was under arrest. We didn’t even draw straws. No one said anythin’. No one knew when it was goin’ to happen, and maybe Barrow’d show or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe because of that you were wonderin’ what you were doin’—sneakin’ through brush waitin’ to ambush a couple people, one with murder warrants floatin’ and the other, the girl, no murder warrants on her. That had a bad taste when you figured maybe we were goin’ to arrest that gal but if her boyfriend started shootin’, you knew damn well it was all over. Near sundown we had a talk, all of us half-whisperin’ as the night fell fast, sayin’ the job was to mow Barrow down. Not to arrest a damn anyone.
“‘None of us had any questions, a couple were thinkin’ questions, but no one put any out there. No one had intention of anyone jumpin’ out on that road to get killed. Your gut said he wasn’t gonna surrender under any reason, and mowin’ them down in cold blood could leave some legal questions, but Captain Hamer said we’d leave those matters to the lawyers since we were just there to do the job we were there to do. All agreed we wouldn’t do any talkin’ about any details after the job was done.