My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

by Barrow, Blanche Caldwell

  Buck had me get in the car, start the motor, and try to get the car moving while everybody else pushed. One of the men helping us was beside the car, where he could look in and see the guns. He told me to cover them up with something just in case someone else stopped to ask questions about the wreck, so they wouldn’t see the guns. I had thought they were covered but somehow the covering had slipped off.

  When we finally got the car back on the highway we found that it still ran fairly good; and the dents in the fender and top weren’t so noticeable, although it was a new car and those places didn’t look too good. Otherwise, it was okay and we could still travel in it. But Buck could hardly drive because his hand had been pinched so badly. Consequently, I drove quite a lot. Buck only drove when we stopped in, or passed through, large towns. And even though we felt safe enough to stop and sleep at tourist camps whenever we wished, we still did a lot of driving at night.

  We continued on to Jacksonville, but did not stay there as we had planned. Instead, we turned north and drove along the Atlantic coast. We stopped at a small town, Cumberland, Georgia, I believe,3 and went in bathing and playing around up and down the beach. Then we tried to rent a furnished house for the summer, but Clyde and Buck couldn’t agree on which place to take and got into another argument. After that, Buck got drunk. He didn’t want to leave, so he and Clyde split up. Shortly after that, Clyde and Bonnie left town.

  I was glad we were going to be alone, but my hopes were soon shattered. Buck kept drinking and talking so loud that people would stop and stare at us. I begged him to be quiet and told him we would have every cop in town after us. Before I knew it, we were arguing. He wanted to stop right on the street and fight. I was almost mad enough to fight too, but I tried to reason with him instead. Finally I told him to drive to the country and let me out, that I was through if he couldn’t do any better than that. I didn’t want to stay with him any longer.

  “We . . . went in bathing and playing around up and down the beach. . . . Buck and I both liked Florida a lot.” (Photograph by Buck Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  At first he said, “Okay. If you want to leave, then go ahead and get out now.” But when I started to go he changed his mind and told me to get back in the car. I refused. With that, he started talking so loud that I had to get in with him. I wouldn’t have left anyway, but I was still mad.

  Suddenly Clyde and Bonnie drove up. I don’t know why but they had come back to look for us, saying they had looked the town over for us. Clyde told Buck he had seen some motorcycle cops riding in town and they seemed to be checking all cars on the road. Since there was only one road leading in or out of town, he thought it best to get away while we still could. If they ever blocked the road, we would have to jump into the ocean or die fighting.

  When we were out of town Buck began begging me not to leave. I was still mad and insisted I would leave him. I told him to just stop any place he felt like. He wanted to know how I would get home. I told him not to worry, that I could take care of myself. I said I didn’t need anyone to take care of me like I was a two-year-old baby.

  Buck and Blanche in Tennessee. “We drove through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee. ...” (Photograph by Clyde Jones, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  “But, honey, you can’t go home,” he said. “The cops will get you.”

  Blanche Barrow in Mobile, Alabama. “... then south to Alabama.” (Photograph by Buck Barrow. Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  “I don’t care if they do,” I said, even though I knew I was lying. I did care. I never wanted them to get me. The thought of going to prison seemed just as bad as being killed. I really feared prison, even though I had never been inside of one except to visit Buck or Clyde. Still I had a horror of ever going to prison.

  Buck kept pleading with me not to leave. Then he said he would not let me go, that he couldn’t live without me. “What would I have to live for?” he asked. He was sobering up a bit and becoming reasonable. I didn’t get out. Soon our argument ended as it usually did, with each of us crying and saying how sorry we were for hurting the other.

  That night we rented a nice double cabin north of Brunswick, Georgia.4 We decided to stay there a few days if everything seemed okay. Bonnie and Clyde drove to another place on the beach to look around after we had eaten and taken our baths. Buck and I didn’t want to go. Buck wanted to work on some of his guns, so we just stayed at the cabin.

  Bonnie and Clyde were not gone long. Soon after they returned, Clyde went to the station to get something but stopped a few feet away, in the shadow of another little building of some kind. He had noticed two highway patrolmen parked under the station’s awning. They were sitting in their car talking to the owner. Clyde caught part of the conversation, but not enough to know if the patrolmen were checking up on us. He felt sure they were, though.

  Clyde came back to the cabins and told us what he’d seen. He thought we should leave, but added that he sure hated to leave those good beds without even getting to sleep in them. But he told us to get ready to leave anyway. Then he went to the woman he had rented the cabins from. He told her we had rented an apartment in town and that he wanted his money back. She agreed.

  When Clyde got back with money we were ready to leave. The patrolmen were still at the station. We drove out toward Brunswick. Then, as soon as we were out of sight, we turned around and passed by the station. The patrolmen were still there. They pulled out and started chasing us, but we soon lost them.5

  We drove almost all night. Bonnie and I drove for a couple of hours while Buck and Clyde slept. Then we drove off the road into a forest of pine trees and slept until about ten o’clock. After that, it was the same old story, afraid to stop anyplace. We kept driving, stopping only to sleep in the car. We drove through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, then south to Alabama,6 and west through Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. I think we traveled most every highway in each of those states!

  Clyde wanted to go back to Dallas and get W. D. but Buck tried to talk him out of getting the kid again. Buck told Clyde that he was going to get killed fooling around with W. D. because if he ever got caught he would tell everything he knew and put Clyde on the spot. Buck said W. D. was too much of a kid to stand up under the punishment of a police grilling. He would talk to clear himself of anything if he had too. He might even talk about everything Clyde had ever done. But Clyde would not listen. He told Buck that he felt better with W. D. than with him.

  “If I were you,” Clyde said, “I wouldn’t say anything about not trusting someone after you thought those two strangers were such good sports and you let them tell you to cover up your guns.”

  Clyde then wrote to his mother and told her to meet them at some appointed place, and to bring W. D. with her.

  9

  A Visit with My Father

  Editor’s Note: June 1933

  In June Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and W. D. Jones were involved in a fiery car wreck near the Texas Panhandle town of Wellington. All three were injured but Parker was critically burned. In the aftermath, Barrow and Jones abducted two local law enforcement officers and escaped with Parker to Oklahoma where the captives were released. Later in the month Buck Barrow and W. D. Jones killed an Arkansas marshal following yet another auto accident.1

  The rest of the month, from Wisconsin to Texas, was hot, both literally and figuratively. Severe weather still ravaged the midcontinent; on the seventh, twenty people were hurt in a Minnesota storm, but record heat was the major concern in June. Between Canada and the Rio Grande many people died of heat-related problems and crops withered away as temperatures rose and a lingering drought worsened.2

  A variety of other stories also made headlines, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to Dallas, Texas, the death of silent-film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle; and congressional passage of the Glass-Steagall banking reform bill, which, among other things, guaranteed deposits of up to $2,500. There were a numb
er of illnesses and deaths reportedly caused by bad beer and spirits. However, much of the news of the month was dominated by crime, beginning with the sometimes-Barrow-accomplice Raymond Hamilton.3

  On June 2, Hamilton’s second trial for the murder of Hillsboro, Texas, storeowner John N. Bucher resulted in another guilty verdict and this time a unanimous opinion about the punishment, ninety-nine years in prison. For Hamilton the sentence meant little. He would receive sentences totaling 266 years before his arrival at the Texas State Penitentiary later in the summer.4

  On June 6, in a crime bearing similarities to the one described by Blanche in her memoir, a deputy sheriff and two citizens of Rison, Arkansas, were abducted and held at gunpoint by a gang of thieves who then tried unsuccessfully to burglarize a number of the town’s businesses. On the ninth, two Chicago women (the wife and sister of bank robber Jack Gray) were charged with the May 12 attempted robbery and subsequent shooting at Lucerne, Indiana, a crime actually perpetrated by the Barrow gang. Two days later, a former accomplice of Clyde Barrow, Frank Hardy, was arrested and charged with the Christmas 1932 murder of Doyle Johnson in Temple, Texas, something Hardy had nothing to do with. Johnson was really killed by Barrow and W. D. Jones.5

  A number of Plains states banks were robbed in June, including banks in Bokchito, Oklahoma; Seneca, Missouri; and Prescott, Kansas. On June 14, the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Mexico, Missouri, was robbed of $1,750. An hour later, a deputy sheriff and a Missouri state patrolman were killed in a gun battle at the intersection of Highways 40 and 63, north of Columbia, Missouri.6

  On June 17, a bloody gun battle erupted in Kansas City’s Union Station parking lot. Five people, including two Kansas City detectives, an Oklahoma sheriff, and an agent with the federal Department of Justice Bureau of Criminal Investigation,7 along with a prisoner, bank robber Frank Nash, were all killed in a failed attempt to free Nash. This became a pivotal event in depression-era crime. Known today as “the Kansas City massacre” and the “Union Station massacre,” it served as an opportune anti-crime catalyst used to great effect as a public relations tool by bureau director J. Edgar Hoover to substantially increase his agency’s power.8 A little more than a month later, in the aftermath of the murders and the increased police and bureau of investigation presence they brought to Kansas City, a serious, somewhat childish argument in relation to that would flare between Clyde and Buck Barrow. (See Chapter 12.)

  ON JUNE 6, WE drove through Texas to Oklahoma and slept in the woods there that night. Buck and I had abandoned our sedan, the one we wrecked in Florida, and replaced it with a gray Ford V-8 sedan. We were going to visit my father the following day while Clyde went to meet his mother near Dallas. We planned to rejoin Clyde later that afternoon, near Hugo, Oklahoma.

  When we awoke on the morning of the seventh, Clyde and Bonnie went to Dallas, and Buck and I drove to Goodwater, Oklahoma,9 to see my father. I was so happy about seeing him once more. It had been almost two years since we last met, since before my marriage to Buck.

  When we got to my father’s place he was in a field about a half-mile from the house, plowing. We had to wait about an hour for him to come in at noon. As he approached, I ran out to meet him. He couldn’t see well enough to know who I was until I was almost touching him. His nephew saw me first (dad was staying with one of his brothers and his family).10 He told dad I was there but he did not understand what he said because dad is almost deaf and you have to speak very loud to him. When I saw him, I noticed his hair was white as snow. I couldn’t keep from crying because I knew I had caused those hairs to turn white. I loved my dad so dearly that I would have rather died than cause him one minute’s suffering. It hurt so because I knew I had caused him so much grief. My love for one man, my husband, had caused me to bring grief and sorrow to the other man in my life, the other one I loved dearly—my dad. Oh God! Why did I have to cause him so much sorrow? I had turned his hair to gray and put many more lines in his dear, old kind face. His hair had once been raven black. The last time I saw dad, his hair had been streaked with gray, but now it was all white. Although dad was sixty years of age, he had not begun to show his age until a few years ago. He had been sick most of the time for the past ten years. It wasn’t often that he could work. I was sure he had tuberculosis. I had thought so for years.

  When he finally recognized me, he said he could hardly believe it was me. He held me in his arms, crying. I thought he would never let me go. He had read about the Joplin case, but could hardly believe anything so terrible could happen to his baby girl. I would always be just a baby to him.

  We stayed a couple of hours, had dinner there. I told him as near as I could about what had happened to Buck and me. We were innocent, and yet we could not stop. We had to keep going. We hoped to someday prove our innocence and be free again. But we were just trying to kid ourselves. Deep down inside we knew we would never be free again. Sooner or later we would be killed.

  We gave dad some money. He didn’t want to take it, but we told him he may need it in case something should happen to me. Then he could use it to come to see me. It was alright for him to stay with his brother as long as I could buy his clothes and send him money for the few things he needed. He had spent the best part of his life working with them, and for them, and he had more than paid for his keep even though he was sick most of the time. I thought he would be welcome to make his home with his brother’s family for the rest of his life, in case I don’t ever come back to him alive.

  Matt Caldwell, Blanche’s father. (Photograph by Blanche Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  My aunt called me to one side and told me to be sure to leave my dad some money because the last clothes I had gotten for him early in the spring, before Buck was released from prison, were just about gone. I told her I had already given him some money and told her I would pay her for our dinner before I left. She said she did not want me to do that. She just asked me to continue sending dad clothes, or money, or both, just as I had been doing for the past five years. I told her not to worry, that I would never forget dad, and that I hoped they would take good care of him when I was dead and couldn’t do anymore for him. That was the first and last money I gave dad between the time Buck got out of prison and when I was captured.

  We left dad about one-thirty or two o’clock. Buck had to drive fast to make up for the lost time. We did not want to miss meeting Clyde at the appointed time. As we drove through Idabel, Oklahoma, we encountered a detour and somehow got on the wrong highway. After we realized what had happened, we had to backtrack and find the road to Hugo, Oklahoma.11

  Then about twelve or fourteen miles from Hugo we hit some loose gravel on a sharp curve. Buck did not see the gravel in time to avoid having a wreck. The front of the car was almost ruined beyond repair. We were both shook up and bruised, but not hurt badly.

  We both jumped out and removed as much of the baggage and guns as we could and hid them in a small group of bushes beside the road. Then we came back after the rest of the guns. Buck would have to take someone’s car. He left me with the guns and baggage and went back to the highway to stop the first car that came by. He waited for a long time but no cars passed.

  Some farmer who was working in a field nearby came over to see if anyone had been hurt, or if he could help. Buck asked him if he could drive us to town so we could get a wrecker. The farmer said he didn’t have a car but he believed he could get his brother-in-law to drive us. While Buck was talking to the farmer, several cars passed. Buck wanted to get this fellow out of the way so he would not see him take a car. Then Buck asked him to sit there by our car and tell anyone who may stop that he was watching the car while the owner went to get a wrecker.

  Buck came over and told me that he thought he would be able to get a car soon. He said for me to stay out of sight until he could get one. By this time, the farmer had talked to his brother-in-law, who was working in the same field. He said he would go get his car. Buck told him he was hauling liquor from Texarkana and
didn’t want the law to get the news about the wreck if he could help it. Buck said he would pay him fifty dollars to drive us to the nearest town. The brother-in-law returned with a Model T Ford touring car. He pulled up on the other side of the little bunch of bushes, opposite our wrecked car, near the highway in the ditch. We put everything in his car. We had the guns wrapped so no one could tell what they were.

  As we rode away, a car filled with officers drove up and stopped at the wrecked car. One of the farmers saw them and told us who they were. But the officers didn’t see us. If the farmers had known who we were I am sure we would have been left there with the officers.12 But they didn’t know a thing about us and so we were driven to Hugo. We had them drive us to a tourist camp. We rented a cabin, paid them, and they left us.

  We could see the highway from the cabin. We watched it closely to see if Clyde would drive by, looking for us. We were sure he had given up hope of us getting to the spot where we agreed to meet him. Or maybe he thought we had grown tired of waiting for him and left. If we missed each other at Hugo, we were to meet at another small town in the northern part of Oklahoma.

  We didn’t see Clyde. Buck left the camp to go look for a car. He said he would be back in a few minutes if he got one. If I saw Clyde drive by, I was to stop him. Buck was hoping not to have to take a car in a little town like Hugo. It would be best not to get the country hot all over again. That’s why he paid the farmer to drive us away from the wreck, to keep from putting more heat on us, and on Clyde too.

  Buck came back in a few minutes. He had walked around a couple or three blocks. He hadn’t been back long when I saw a car that looked like Clyde’s roadster. Buck left the cabin and headed Clyde off when he turned around and started back through town. They came to the cabin; we got in the car and drove away. We had to ride in the rumble seat again, but we were glad to do so that time.