My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

  Blanche riding her favorite horse on her property near Seagoville, Texas. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  The location was very near Kemp, Texas, where Clyde Barrow, Ralph Fults, and Bonnie Parker shot it out with a posse on April 19, 1932. That was the incident mentioned by Blanche early in her memoir, when Fults was wounded and captured along with Parker. However, the chief reason for the move to Cedar Creek was not to conjure memories, but to fish.

  “Jean and Blanche would fish in a bucket of water,” Rhea Leen once said. “But you took your life in your own hands when you fished with Blanche.” The image of a 4-foot 11-inch tall, 100-pound woman with impaired vision swinging a rod that was bigger than she was and heaving a fishing line all over the 4-by-15-foot pier was the one most readily remembered. Apparently, no one would fish on the same pier with her for fear of being slapped with a rod or snagged by a baited hook. “We couldn’t fish for dodging Blanche’s line!” Rhea Leen remembered.68 The only time anyone would venture within range of her was when she would knock her stool off the pier into the shallow water and someone, invariably Moon, had to retrieve it for her. This happened a lot.

  One thing Moon refused to be a part of was grocery shopping with Jean and Blanche. The two women would arrive together, each take a grocery cart, and disappear down the aisles in opposite directions. But they would keep in contact by calling out to one another.

  “Blanche, where are you?”

  “I’m over here.”

  “Did you see the sale over here?”

  “The bananas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get some?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m about through.”

  “Me too.”

  When they met at the checkout counter, they often had many of the same things in their carts, especially Oreos.69

  Both were faithful collectors of S&H Green Stamps, the old bonus program very popular between the 1950s and 1980s that was based on how much one bought at the grocery store. Stamps issued with each purchase were redeemable at Green Stamp stores for a wide variety of products ranging from small appliances, clothes, and toys to tools, camping equipment, and larger items. One day Jean and Blanche were in the checkout line at the Green Stamp store. The line was rather long and as they waited a woman in front of them kept asking Jean and Blanche to hold her place while she either exchanged an item or added to her purchases. This kept happening all the way up to the counter. Then at the cash register, the woman suddenly thought of something else she wanted. She hoisted her open purse onto the counter and turned to Jean and Blanche one last time. “Would you watch my purse while I run and grab something else?” she asked. Before she could get an answer one way or another, the woman darted off, leaving her purse in the custody of the two grandmotherly-looking strangers who happened to be convicted felons, all her cash and credit cards in plain view. Blanche turned to Jean and smiled. “If she only knew who we are!” she said. Then she and Jean burst out laughing. The woman returned and offered a brief chuckle, not really sure what was so funny.70

  Nevertheless, it was not all fun and laughter. The plight of the ex-convict trying to reenter society, though tough enough for Blanche, especially in the early days of her freedom, was more pronounced in the lives of certain members of the Barrow family, as well as in Jean’s life.71 Even before the death of her sister, Jean was charged with two murders actually committed by Clyde Barrow and Henry Methvin, the heinous Easter Sunday shootings of two unsuspecting motorcycle officers of the Texas State Highway Patrol who had made the fatal mistake of approaching the wrong car at the wrong time. The story of how Jean, who was nowhere near the location at the time of the shootings, came to be charged with these crimes is strange and convoluted. Largely ignoring the testimony of two eyewitnesses who saw “the taller of two men” firing at the two lawmen on a dirt lane called East Dove Road northwest of Grapevine, Texas, Tarrant County officials (and nearly everyone else since) focused on the constantly changing story of a farmer named William Schieffer. Initially Schieffer said that although he saw the car and some people walking around it on occasion, and indeed heard the shots, he had been too far away to get a good look at the killers. Later, he was entirely unsuccessful in identifying anyone in a mug book that included pictures of Bonnie and Clyde.

  Billie Jean Parker Moon, 1968. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

  The murders were particularly tragic. One of the officers, H. D. Murphy, was in training. It had been his first day on patrol. Apparently he and the other officer, E. B. Wheeler, who was one of the first men to sign on to the recently formed Texas Highway Patrol, had spotted a lone Ford V-8 parked on a side road about one hundred yards off of Highway 114. Thinking they had found a motorist in distress, the two men turned up the road to investigate. The two main duties of the agency at the time were to monitor the weight of commercial trucks and assist stranded travelers. It seemed the perfect situation for Wheeler and his trainee. A third officer, Polk Ivy, continued along the highway.

  In and around the car were Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and Henry Methvin. Out on the highway, driving behind the officers was a Dallas couple out for a drive. They saw the two officers turn up the road, joking that it would be a shame to get a ticket on Easter Sunday. Then they heard shots and saw the “taller of two men” firing into the prone bodies of the officers. The car and its occupants then sped away. By then, Polk Ivy, wondering what was taking his partner and the new man so long, had turned around. He returned to the scene shortly after the killers had left.

  After appearing once in two of the four Dallas papers, the testimony of the Dallas couple appears to have been swept into the background and replaced by that of the local farmer William Schieffer, who had admittedly been too far away to get a good look at the perpetrators. Whether this shift in focus was deliberate may never be known, but there was a major problem for state officials with the account of the Dallas couple: They saw the “taller of two men,” which would have been Henry Methvin, shoot the officers. The fact that Methvin was involved in a highly publicized, horribly unnecessary double murder was a very real political liability for some in Texas state government. At the time of the murders, Governor Miriam Ferguson had approved a plan that would have pardoned Henry Methvin for crimes committed in Texas in exchange for information leading to the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde. Diversion, misinformation, and political ambition all seem to have converged, and the result was William Schieffer.

  From the start, the focus had been on Bonnie and Clyde, then suddenly Schieffer began saying he had been close enough to identify the killers. He named Bonnie’s sister, Billie Jean, and Floyd Hamilton, Raymond Hamilton’s older brother, as the murderers of Wheeler and Murphy. Billie Jean and Floyd were charged with the killings by Tarrant County prosecutors. Within days of her arrest, Billie Jean received word that her sister had been killed in an ambush in Louisiana. She attended the funeral with a heavy police escort.

  Billie Jean’s case actually made it to trial, but it was dismissed by a very apologetic judge when it was disclosed that a firearms expert had determined that guns in the possession of Bonnie and Clyde were used in the murders of Wheeler and Murphy. The crowd in the courtroom actually cheered when the case was thrown out.72

  And what of Henry Methvin? Conveniently, he was not with Bonnie and Clyde when they were killed. Moreover, on August 14, 1934, he was issued a pardon from the State of Texas. Years later, in a book published on the life and career of Frank Hamer, one of the six officers who killed Bonnie and Clyde, William Schieffer is quoted as claiming to have been close enough to the murderers of Wheeler and Murphy to actually see Bonnie shoot one of the officers. Thus, Schieffer’s account went from his having been too far away to identify the assailants to having crawled to within yards of the murder scene and watched every detail. The couple driving behind the officers, the ones who saw “the taller of two men” firing into the bodies, were never he
ard from again.73

  Nevertheless, that was not the end of Jean’s troubles. The following year she, like Blanche, was charged with harboring Bonnie and Clyde and tried in federal court in Dallas, Texas. She was convicted and sentenced to a year and a day at Alderson Federal Prison for Women in West Virginia. On her release, she returned to the Dallas area but moved frequently to avoid press and police scrutiny. On occasion, she moved outside of Dallas, usually to an aunt’s home in Gladewater, Texas. Wherever she was, she lived in fear of her employers finding out to whom she was related. She worked as a beautician at the Band Box Beauty Shop in Oak Cliff and as a waitress in a number of cafes and restaurants, including the old Circle Grill in Mesquite, Texas, and Cantrell’s on Harry Hines Boulevard in Dallas. While she was at Cantrell’s she realized something about the owner, Tom Cantrell, she never dreamed possible. The milk deliveryman had discovered who Jean was and decided to tell Cantrell. She waited to be fired. Suddenly she heard loud voices, then saw Cantrell leading the milk deliveryman out to his truck, saying, “Get out! If you’ll lie, you’ll steal.” He told the delivery-man never to come back and that he was going to order his milk elsewhere from then on. Evidently, Cantrell had known all along who Jean was and was feigning ignorance to the deliveryman to maintain Jean’s secret.

  After Jean met Arthur Moon, however, she did not have to deal with jobs and the public, and the quality of her life vastly improved. Moreover, Moon was very protective of Jean. Anytime someone called wanting to talk to “Billie Parker” he would hang up without a word. The association of the name “Billie” with that horrible past was one reason why Jean eventually dropped the name entirely. LC Barrow adopted the name “Leon” in place of his better-known given name. He chose the new name in honor of his former brother-in-law, Leon Hale, who was once married to Nell Barrow and who taught Clyde Barrow to play the saxophone.74 For LC and other members of the Barrow family, though, it did little to stem the notoriety of the Barrow name.

  Five of the seven children of Cumie and Henry Barrow spent time in prison. And two, Clyde and Buck, died at the hands of the law. Some of the other children were truly guilty of the crimes they were later convicted of, but some were simply railroaded into jail because of their last name. Before his brother Clyde was killed, it had become routine for LC to be picked up by either the Dallas police or the county sheriff’s department. His reaction to his brief apprehension in Denison, described by Blanche early in her memoir, offers a glimpse of just how common such an event had already become. Shortly after Bonnie and Clyde were killed, however, the heat was turned up on LC Barrow. He had already been in jail two months at the time his brother was killed, charged with the armed robbery of three men in east Dallas. The victims told the authorities, in sworn affidavits, that Barrow was not the man who robbed them.75 They also charged that the police persisted in having them view line-up after line-up that included LC. Each time the victims could identify no one. Finally, after they were made to view a line-up that had only one suspect, LC, the victims went to the news media and charged authorities with trying to frame Barrow. The robbery charges were suddenly dismissed.

  Then LC was charged with the robbery of a drugstore in Oak Cliff. Despite the fact that the others charged in the same case asserted that LC was not involved, he was sentenced to five years in the Texas State Penitentiary. The following year he was also charged with harboring Bonnie and Clyde, along with Jean and Blanche, and received the maximum sentence, two years. Thereafter he was in and out of jail and prison, sometimes for real crimes (usually stemming from parole violations), often for imaginary crimes.76 When he was not under arrest, he was under almost constant surveillance. For a period of time, he owned and operated a hamburger joint and pool hall for teenagers, something to keep them off the streets and out of trouble. Nevertheless, city and county officers paid almost daily visits. Once when LC made an illegal turn near Fair Park he was pulled over by the policeman following him at the time. The officer, who was very young, apparently made some off-color remark about the Barrow family’s past. Muddled with anger, LC told the officer he was too young to know anything about the Barrows and to mind his “own goddamned business!” Barrow was promptly roughed up, cuffed, and arrested.77 This went on almost all of his life.

  Within days of moving to Cedar Creek Lake in 1984, Jean and Blanche were comparing notes:

  “Well, I got my call,” announced Blanche with a grin.

  “Oh, I got mine last week!” Jean retorted.

  Jean’s niece asked what they were talking about. When she was told about the persistent calls from the police whenever they moved, she was outraged. Nevertheless, Jean and Blanche thought it was so funny that some officials still felt threatened by a pair of “little, old gray-haired ladies” who had not been in trouble in fifty years.

  Blanche was still getting settled at her new location on Cedar Creek Lake when someone from her past knocked on her trailer door. Esther Weiser had moved back to Texas to work as special assistant to Dallas County District Clerk Bill Long. The two women renewed their friendship and told each other what had been going on in their lives for the previous three decades. Thereafter they often stayed up well into the night talking. Invariably Blanche would drift off to sleep, still sitting in her oversized recliner, a cat purring in her lap. Sometimes Esther would just stay the night at Blanche’s trailer, getting up before daybreak to beat the traffic into downtown Dallas. The two women became very close. Nevertheless, Blanche’s other friends never saw Esther. They heard a lot about her, but never saw her.

  “It was a long time before we met [Esther],” Jean’s niece, Rhea Leen said. “Blanche did not want to share her.”

  Likewise, Blanche spoke often of her friends, especially Jean and Moon, but seemed more than reticent to invite them to join her and Esther. Whenever Esther would suggest such a thing, Blanche usually answered with something like, “Oh, no! They’re busy.” This compartmentalization of friends appears to have been a lifelong trait of Blanche’s. She indicates as much in her memoir, with Buck, Clyde, their mother, her own mother, and so on. She also exhibited an aptitude for pitting friends and acquaintances against each other by saying something adverse about one person in their absence to some other person, and vice versa. To some friends Blanche indicated her distrust and dislike for a well-known Dallas columnist who befriended her in the late 1960s. This writer and his wife remained rather close to Blanche all the way up to her death, sometimes taking her to Campisi’s, a restaurant where she would invariably order shrimp scampi. However, to others she had nothing but good things to say about this columnist.

  Blanche and Esther L. Weiser, Cedar Creek Lake, Texas, 1984. (Courtesy of Esther L. Weiser)

  Nevertheless, Blanche’s little games were a lot more transparent than she thought. Once after Rhea Leen became very angry with a couple because of some comments Blanche made about them, she admitted, “Of course, there’s no telling what Blanche told them about me.”78 Nevertheless, despite her flaws, people who knew her still loved her. “Here I am, warts and all!” is what she seemed to say to everyone.

  Blanche loved to drive. She would take long drives all around north Texas in a white 1960s model Ford LTD sedan that everyone referred to as “The Bomb.” The car was big enough by itself, but next to Blanche, it was enormous. Dressed in the same kind of riding breeches and boots she had worn in Dexfield Park, she would slip her 4-foot 11-inch frame behind the wheel, pull the seat up as far as it would go, and take off down some long series of country roads, barely able to see over the top of the dash with her one good eye. She drove fast, never used main roads, and never got lost. She seemed to know every little back road in north Texas. Indeed, her skill as a driver may account for the fact that she was able to keep up with Clyde Barrow after that unsuccessful robbery mentioned in her memoir.

  During these sojourns, which usually occupied every weekend, Blanche would try out different small town cafes and restaurants. She was a connoisseur of country cuisine. She
also liked to “go antiquing,” which meant browsing every little trinket shop along the way. Her trailer was full of trinkets. She also liked costume jewelry. She had a few pieces of fine jewelry, but she had an affinity for less-expensive things.

  W. D. Jones, Houston, Texas, 1969. (Photograph by Kent Biffle, Phillips Collection)

  One day in May 1984, Blanche turned on the television and saw someone she had not heard from in half a century. Ralph Fults was being interviewed by a local Dallas station on the fiftieth anniversary of the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde. “I thought he was dead,” Blanche said. “I thought they hanged him over in Mississippi. The last time I saw Ralph was in the Kaufman County jail after he and Bonnie got caught near Kemp. Clyde took me down there to tell them he had a plan to bust them out of jail. I hadn’t seen him since.”79

  Blanche recalled thinking as she watched Fults on the television, “That’s not Ralph Fults! He was this tall, good-looking, twenty-something-year-old fellow—not an old man. And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I guess we’re all a lot older now.’” She also remembered that Fults “was very handsome, but that kid, W. D. Jones, was the best-looking one of all!”80

  Blanche got Fults’s number and phoned him. She found out he was working on a book about Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, Raymond, and all the others. She paid him a visit, driving up to his home in Mesquite in “The Bomb” to reminisce and share thoughts. She found that he had never received a death sentence in Mississippi for the bank robbery he and Raymond Hamilton had staged. It had been erroneously reported that way. He had received instead two fifty-year terms, but was pardoned during World War II. He married, raised a family, and managed to stay out of trouble. He was a grandfather who had spent a great deal of his post-prison time speaking free of charge to any church or civic group that wanted him about the wholly unglamorous, very real world of juvenile delinquency and adult criminal behavior—and how to avoid such a life. His book, he told her, would address the same issues.