Fugitives- The True Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker

by Emma Parker

  "Hell," W.D. exploded. "I’m in jail all the time as it is. I might as well get something out of it."

  They had a big argument, but in the end W. D. went out with Clyde and Bonnie. I want to tell a peculiar thing right here. After Clyde and Raymond split up, the things Raymond wrote and said about Clyde made him furious. When W. D. got caught and started his series of fantastic stories about how Clyde chained him to trees and forced him to stay with him, Clyde was not angry at all. He'd say, "Heck, I don't blame the kid for trying to get out of it if he can. I'd do it, too." The only time I ever saw him really angry with W. D. was when Clyde thought Frank Hardy was going to get the chair for a murder that W. D. had committed himself, and W. D. wouldn't come forward and take the blame. That was the Doyle Johnson murder at Temple on December 5, 1932.

  W. D. got in trouble right from the start. He was only sixteen when he started out and he wasn't accustomed to the sort of life Clyde was living.

  W. D. went to steal a car in Belton this evening in December. It looked like an easy job, for the car was parked in front of a house with the keys left in it. W. D. was in the driver's seat when the door of the house opened and an old lady ran out on the porch and started screaming for help. In an instant she was joined by a man who was evidently her husband, and both of them were yelling. Clyde and Bonnie were sitting across the street in their car waiting for W. D. to get the motor going, when the old man started down the sidewalk. Clyde jumped out, and ran over to help W. D. start it, for W. D. had lost his head and couldn't seem to get it going with all the racket around him.

  Bonnie, telling the story afterwards, said that just here a young man appeared on the porch, took in the situation, and ran down to the car. Clyde was on the left side, leaning in and working with the gears, and this young man — it was Doyle Johnson — rushed up to him and seized him by the wrists, pulling him around. They grappled there, the man still clinging to Clyde's wrists and yelling something to his folks about phoning the police.

  "I was sure scared," Bonnie said, "and I’d have driven away if Clyde hadn’t been in a jam. As it was, I never heard so much screaming and hollering in my life, and it looked like the whole town was going to be right on us in a minute. I knew it wouldn’t matter if W. D. got caught, for he hadn’t done anything to get electrocuted for, so I didn’t worry any about him. It was Clyde I was scared about. I shifted gears and came alongside the car and called to Clyde to let the thing go and come on, quick. It was just here that W. D. let him have it. The man who was holding Clyde sort of crumpled up, Clyde jerked loose and ran around and jumped on the running board.

  "W. D. followed him, and I stepped on it. Clyde was breathing hard and as mad as I’ve ever seen him. ‘You dumb punk!’ he said to W. D. ‘They didn’t have any guns, either of them. We could have got away without killing him if you’d used your head. Now you’ve got a murder chalked up against you. I ought to kick your rear till you had to ride on your stomach a week. I told you you’d get into trouble if you came along, but, damn it, I didn’t think you’d do it so sudden’!"

  W. D. was really scared, too. He got out of the car at Dallas and went home to his folks to spend Christmas, and a sorry Christmas he must have had. Bonnie and Clyde went to the Grand Prairie hideout, but we didn't see them till the first week in January. Of course, we didn't know anything at all about their being mixed up in the Belton business because it was not until the following spring, 1933, that the officers arrested anybody for the Doyle Johnson murder, and then the man they arrested was Frank Hardy and not W. D. Jones.

  It was in the fall of 1933 that W. D. was taken into custody, while picking cotton in South Texas. At that time Frank Hardy was still being held for the Doyle Johnson murder, and it looked as if he were going to be convicted. W. D. had been traced through the pictures made with Clyde and Bonnie, which the officers found after the Joplin battle. He was brought to Dallas and confronted with these proofs by the officers. Whereupon he began to fabricate the most amazing story of his being forced to go with Clyde against his will and on fear of death; of having been constantly chained to trees and fences to prevent his escape; and of having never fired a gun during the whole time.

  In fact, one of the most amusing features of W. D.'s fantastic yarn was that he was always unconscious when anything happened. He was unconscious at Wellington when he shot a woman's hand off; he was unconscious at Joplin when he helped Clyde kill two officers; he was again unconscious at Platte City; he was apparently unconscious when he helped Buck commit the robbery at Fayetteville and kill the marshal at Alma. He says he wasn't along and that the man who really did it was Clyde. Clyde was sitting beside Bonnie's bed in a tourist camp at Ft. Smith, begging her not to die, and refusing to leave her for an instant. More than that, Buck Barrow, on his dying bed after the Dexter, Iowa, gun battle, admitted before his mother, Mrs. Parker and the officers that he and W. D. committed both the Fayetteville and the Alma crimes and that Clyde wasn't even with them.

  I, myself, know that every time W. D. got separated from Clyde, he'd come out to West Dallas and patrol that pike, waiting for some word from Clyde so that he could join him again. And I know, too, that when Bonnie was so seriously injured, and her sister Billie, went to Ft. Smith to be with her, W. D. was there the whole time, coming and going as free as the air, and Billie told us that she never saw a handcuff or a chain, and didn't even know that W. D. was being held a prisoner against his will till six months later when she read the story in the Dallas papers. Billie said, so frantic was Clyde over Bonnie's condition that W. D. could have walked off any time he wanted to go and Clyde wouldn't even have missed him.

  These stories that W. D. told amused Clyde and never made him mad. He said he hoped the kid put it over and got away with it. It was only this Frank Hardy business that made Clyde angry with W. D. He said W. D. was a dirty rat if he let Hardy go to the chair for something he hadn't done. I remember one night when we met Clyde and Bonnie out near Cedar Hill, Clyde asked us if we had any ink so he could make finger prints on paper. "I want to send a letter to the laws and tell them W. D. and I did that Doyle Johnson killing," he said. "If I say that W. D. did it alone, they won't believe me, for they'll think I'm trying to shift the blame, but if I say I was in on it, too, maybe they'll turn Hardy loose."

  We hadn't any ink, so at Bonnie's suggestion, Clyde stuck his fingers in car grease and made prints and gave us the paper, but the prints smeared and were of no use when we got back home, so we never sent the note. However, Hardy was cleared of the charge later and it was laid on Clyde.

  Bonnie and Clyde showed up in Dallas on January 6, 1933. They arrived at the home of Bonnie's mother rather early. W. D. says in his "memoirs" that he went out to Mrs. Parker's house that night and stayed quite a while, but to this good day Mrs. Parker has never laid eyes on the boy. Bonnie stayed only a few minutes, and it was evident in those few minutes that she had been drinking — something her mother had never seen her do before. The sight of her in this condition, plus the knowledge that Lamar Street was crowded with passing officers, frightened Mrs. Parker badly. She begged Bonnie to get out of town at once, saying she'd rather forego the pleasure of seeing her at all than to have her take such terrible risks. Bonnie insisted that they were leaving right away. Clyde, she said, was in town solely to see some one for the purpose of mapping out some sort of campaign to free Raymond from Huntsville. Bonnie stayed only a few minutes and left.

  The first intimation we had that there had been any trouble was when the officers came to Mrs. Parker's house at midnight or a little after, and asked for Billie. They refused to tell Mrs. Parker what they wanted, but as soon as they had gone, Billie told her. Malcolm Davis, a deputy, had been shot at Lillie McBride's house and the concensus of opinion was that Clyde Barrow had done it. Knowing what she did know, Mrs. Parker was pretty sure of it. We did not get the story from Clyde's lips till the following May when we saw them again.

  This is what happened: Odell Chandless, a former convict, h
ad robbed a bank at Grapevine, December 31, 1932, and headed toward Dallas. Officers believed that he meant to visit Lillie McBride eventually, so they set a trap for him. Mrs. McBride was in Huntsville visiting with Raymond. The officers took advantage of her absence to stage a jolly little welcome for Chandless, if he should come. There were five deputies in all, and they hid around the house, waiting. The terrible joke was on them, if you call it a joke. Chandless never came, but Clyde Barrow did, and when the smoke cleared away, there was another murder to chalk up against my brother.

  Clyde, Bonnie, and W. D. drove up to the McBride house just before midnight. I have already said that Bonnie had been drinking, but I want to say here that Clyde had not; that he drank seldom; that I never knew him to be drunk in my life. He once told me that with his life hanging by a thread, and the constant fear of death at his heels, he would be a fool to drug his mind with liquor and lessen the chances of getting out of tight places. He also told me that Bonnie had begun drinking only after she had been out on the road with him awhile.

  "I let her have at it about once a week," he explained, because the poor kid’s nerves can’t stand the strain. She’s not built for this sort of thing, and it gets her. But I don’t use the stuff much, Sis. Not from any moral sense, but from the standpoint of good common sense. I’d be an idiot to do it. No, I wasn’t drunk the night we killed Malcolm Davis. The cards were just stacked against us, that’s all. I walked into the trap they had laid for Chandless, and when Davis stepped out of the door and yelled ‘Throw up your hands!’ I swung my gun into action. I fired in the dark, and instantly four other guns began going off right in my face. The blackness was spotted with flame. I saw I was outnumbered, so I ran for it."

  Bonnie was at the wheel, waiting, but not expecting any trouble. When the shooting started, she didn't know what had happened nor what to do. W. D. grabbed a gun and began blasting the landscape. Bonnie said she was drunk, but not so drunk that her head wasn't working. She reached over and grabbed W. D.'s arm. "Stop it," she cried. "You're shooting wild and likely to kill people in the houses up and down the street." She stepped on the gas and ran down the block, for the confusion was horrible, everybody screaming, and the officers still firing in the dark. Bonnie said she knew Clyde was either dead or else had made a getaway. She circled the block, and on the other side she saw him running toward her between the houses. He crawled in and took the wheel. Driving like the devil, he shot out past the West Dallas road, across Westmoreland and onto Industrial Boulevard, headed for Oklahoma, and not knowing for sure just how many were dead or dying behind him.

  Clyde said afterwards that he remembered the most poignantly Bonnie's face, white in the darkness, and her voice, a little tremblingly, saying: "I won't go to see mama now, maybe never again."

  "But how did you feel, Clyde?" I wanted to know. "How did you feel, knowing you’d killed another man?"

  "Like I always felt — sick inside — sick and cold and weak — and a sort of dull wishing that I’d never been born. You see, Sis, it’s hard to make you understand, because you’ve never faced it. But it comes so quickly and it happens in an instant — you’re there and they’re there — they’ve got guns and you’ve got guns — you know it’s going to be you or them and there’s no time to think about anything else. You grit your teeth and come down on it —t hey do the same, unless you beat them to it. In that case, they’re telling the story and not you, next day. Then it’s over and done and no going back — you’ve killed a man — you see him lying there, if it’s daylight and you’ve time to wait and look. Life’s gone — you took it — he’ll never live and breathe and laugh again. But if he’d beat you to it, you’d be lying there like that. It gets mixed up — it seems senseless — the whole business — them killing you — you killing them —you wonder why you were born — why anybody was ever born — why God should bother with the whole mess. And you feel so helpless, so unable to do anything about it — and then you run away and get sick, and that’s all."

  I've tried to put it down like he told it to me, jerkingly, in little spurts, his hands passing nervously over his face as he talked. I thought perhaps it might interest people to know just how he said he felt when he'd killed a man. It interested me, for I knew if anyone else had asked Clyde what I had asked him, he'd have said: "Hell, it was them or me — why should I feel anyway about saving my own neck, except glad?" But he wouldn't talk that way to me, and I thought maybe you'd like to know what he said.

  So terriffic was Clyde's driving after this Davis killing, that although he left Dallas after midnight, he was far into eastern Oklahoma before the sun came up. Here they found a quiet tourist camp and rented a cottage, and here they stayed till March, not daring to come into Texas again because of the stir about the Davis killing. We received many letters from him during this period. They were never signed or dated, and were always mailed from a different town, because they were afraid that our mail was being watched. They said very little in the letters — only that they were alive and well, and we were not to worry. Not to worry! We never knew an hour free from worry. The newspapers were like death sentences each day till we read and found them to have no news of Clyde and Bonnie. We lived in constant and hourly dread of disaster; our sleep was troubled with nightmares of their death under some revolting circumstance, and my mother aged before my eyes. It was impossible not to worry, for we knew that Clyde was robbing to live, whether it was in the papers or not, and that every robbery was fraught with danger, perhaps death.

  There has been much sarcastic comment — and with reason — about the fact that Clyde stole for only a few dollars here, a couple of hundred there. They did not know, as we did, that a lot of money wasn't in Clyde's scheme of things. He couldn't spend it if he had it. He was never one to have dreams of grandeur. He had no thought of making one big haul and then leaving the country, to settle down and live in splendor on his stolen wealth. He knew that he must keep on driving, till the end came, if he stayed around near home where he could see his folks, and he meant to see us. He stole only when he needed it and where he happened to find it.

  It is also untrue, as newspapers and thriller magazines have stated, that Clyde stayed close to home in order to get help from us. We were a poor family. Bonnie's mother has always worked for a moderate salary. Neither of the families had anything to give them except a meal now and then, pillows when they had to live in the car, maybe some blankets and quilts, and once a pair of crutches for Bonnie when she was injured. Clyde continued coming home because he loved his people and because Bonnie cried to see her mother. I know this all sounds incongruous, but remember that even the worst criminals have families that they love. These families are human and the criminals are also human, and given to human emotions, sufferings and longings.

  I don't want the reader to get the idea that we consider the things they did were right. The entire business nearly drove us crazy. After the Atoka killing, we realized that Clyde was forever outside the law and constantly in danger of death. We wanted him to live at all costs. On the occasions when we saw him, we did not spend the precious hours which might be the last we'd ever have with him, in denouncing him for his sins.

  After a time the heart and mind become deadened to further suffering. We eventually grew numbed with the state of things; but I never reached the point where the shrill cry of "Extra! " late at night didn't bring me up out of my bed trembling and with the cold perspiration breaking out all over. We came to accept what each day might bring with a sort of dull apathy, shutting our eyes to the headlines, and only opening them when we could see and feel and speak to Clyde and Bonnie again. Always the shadow of sudden death stalked them; walked with them, even in our sight. We never knew what the morning and evening paper might bring.

  Clyde and Bonnie talked often of death, and of how they would meet it when it came. They knew better than anyone that it was inevitable. There was nothing we could do to help them, except to love them to the last. They tried to make light of
the situation to us, and insisted often that they were having a good time. Now and then something ridiculous would happen, and when it did, they made the most of it in the telling.

  Such a thing occurred soon after the Malcolm Davis killing. It was the last of January, when Clyde, W. D., and Bonnie were going through Springfield, Missouri. Clyde, as usual, was driving too fast, and a motorcycle cop, Thomas Persell, took after them and chased them into the edge of town, finally forcing them to the curb. Then he racked his motorcycle and came around to the side of the car to demand, in the eternal formula of speed cops: "Where's the fire, buddy?"

  Clyde grinned at him and began opening the door. "Down the block a piece," he said. "Let's take him, W. D."

  W. D. was out in a flash from the back seat, and before the surprised Mr. Persell could figure out what was happening to him, his gun had been lifted, he was hoisted up unceremoniously and dumped into the back of the car, and a blanket thrown over him. Then W. D. climbed in and put his feet on him and covered him with his own revolver. "Just going for a little ride," Clyde explained, and started his car.

  So quickly had they acted that nobody had seen them. They drove calmly away and left the motorcycle as mute testimony that its owner was missing. All night long people searched frantically for Officer Persell, who was by that time 200 miles away, having made stops at such towns as Buffalo, Fairplay, Golden City, Carthage and finally Oronogo, where they were forced to steal a new battery for their car. At Poundstone Corner the three bade Mr. Persell a hilarious farewell and let him out.

  By that time the officer was as mad as a wet hen, and aware that his plight was rather ridiculous. It was noon of the next day before he could telephone Springfield. He reported that he had been riding with Clyde and Bonnie and an unidentified man. Also, that Bonnie had dyed her hair red. This affair was printed in the papers, and it was the only report we had from them for quite awhile.