Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Read online

  This work is dedicated to “Partners in Crime,” an informal depression-era-outlaws Internet discussion and research group whose members include some of the best-informed people on the subject to be found anywhere. Many of them provided the inspiration, encouragement, and resources which made this book possible. There were also a few other experts who were willing to help a rookie learn the ropes. Thanks, guys. You know who you are.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Knight, James R.

  Bonnie and Clyde : a twenty-first-century update / James R. Knight with Jonathan Davis.– 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Barrow, Clyde, 1909-1934. 2. Parker, Bonnie, 1910-1034. 3. Criminals–United States–Biography. I. Davis, Jonathan. II. Title HV6245.K55 2003

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde

  1. The Barrow Family

  2. Growing Up “ Barrow”

  3. The Move to Dallas

  4. Country Boys in the Big City

  5. The Great Divide

  6. Breaking into the Bigtime

  7. Bonnie

  8. Busted

  9. “ You’re the Sweetest Baby in the World to Me”

  10. The Dumbbell Bandits

  11. Hard Time: Eastham Farm

  12. The Ex-Con

  13. Mud, Mules, and the Lake Dallas Gang

  14. Suicide Sal

  15. A Bad Night in Oklahoma

  16. On the Run

  17. Accidental Tourists

  18. “ Deacon” Jones

  19. “ Don’t Shoot . . . Think of My Babies!”

  20. The Midnight Ride of Tom Persell

  21. Joplin

  22. “ Promise You’ll Embalm Us”

  23. Crash and Burn

  24. “ Worse than Pretty Boy Floyd”

  25. Platte City

  26. “ Take Blanche and Run For It . . . I’m Done For”

  27. “ He Was a Good Boy When He Was Little”

  28. The Sowers Ambush

  29. The Eastham Raid

  30. The Professionals: The Gang

  31. The Professionals: The Law

  32. Easter Sunday

  33. “ Tell Them I Don’t Smoke Cigars”

  34. The Barrow–Hamilton Newspaper Feud

  35. “ The Road Gets Dimmer and Dimmer”

  36. “ They Sow the Wind and Reap the Whirlwind”

  37. A Macabre Circus

  38. The Harboring Trial

  Epilogue

  Appendix One: The Ballad of Donnabell Lee

  Appendix Two: Bonnie and Clyde Death Car History

  Appendix Three: Killings Done by Clyde Barrow or Gang Members

  Appendix Four: Banks Robbed by Clyde Barrow

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  There have always been outlaws.

  For as long as there have been laws, instituted by some authority—God or man—there have been those who, for their own reasons, have chosen to break them. Whether it was David and his small gang of followers running from King Saul and living off the local population in southern Judea three thousand years ago, or Robin of Locksley and his merry men making life miserable for Prince John and the sheriff of Nottingham in twelfth-century England, or an ex-Confederate guerrilla named Jesse Woodson James putting his acquired skills in small-unit tactics to use against banks and railroad express cars, the lives of the men and women who have chosen to live outside the boundaries of society’s rules have always held a kind of fascination for the rest of us. Add to that a pair of tragic, doomed, star-crossed lovers and the tale becomes irresistible.

  The story of Clyde Chestnut Barrow and Bonnie Elizabeth Parker has all the elements of the classic outlaw tale—with a distinctive 1930s “Grapes of Wrath” kind of twist. It has a little Jesse James, only with Ford V-8s and automatic weapons; a little Robin Hood, only with poor sharecroppers, small-town banks, and Texas Rangers; and a little of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, only with moonshine whiskey and told with a southwestern country twang. This is the stuff legends are made of. In Bonnie and Clyde’s case, just as in all the others, the true story behind the legend is not only elusive but in many ways differs from the public perception.

  Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were frontpage news for a few months in the early 1930s, and then they were killed by law enforcement officers under what some thought were suspicious circumstances. After that, they faded from the scene and the public memory for a while. By the time America had come through World War II, few people remembered—or cared—who Bonnie and Clyde were. From that low point, however, they began a slow comeback. Books and articles began to appear now and then—not serious research, but personal stories of people who had been involved with them. It took Hollywood to bring them back to the front page.

  In September 1967, the movie Bonnie and Clyde opened. As history, it was only occasionally accurate, but at the box office, and as public relations for the outlaw couple, it was a success. Coming as it did in the middle of the turbulent sixties, a whole new generation of people who may not even have known their names now saw the couple as antiestablishment heroes. Some of that same feeling existed when Bonnie and Clyde were alive, but only among people who were not in their line of fire. More books and articles came along, and finally, in the last two decades of the century, serious historical research began to be done by a few authors.

  As the twenty-first century begins, there are still a few left who remember Bonnie and Clyde, whose lives were touched by them for good or ill, and it has been my privilege to talk to some of them. Many of these people were a little puzzled at the attention paid to the bandit couple and surprised that anyone would still be interested in hearing about their experiences. By and large, they didn’t see themselves as witnesses to history and didn’t quite understand the excitement of today’s researchers and collectors who pursue their stories and artifacts. One man took one of Clyde’s homemade “whippit guns” (a semiautomatic shotgun cut down with a hacksaw) out of a car abandoned by the gang. Rather than see it as a historically significant weapon belonging to a famous outlaw, he sent it back to the factory to be completely redone. The sawed-off barrel and stock made it useless to him as a quail hunter!

  Others were reluctant to talk about their experiences. For some families, there were painful things they would just as soon leave in the past. Others still feel a real fear concerning their association with the outlaw couple. Since most who told me their stories do so in spite of their misgivings of one kind or another, I’ve tried to honor their desire for anonymity in return for their trust in me.

  Thanks to the work of people such as author John Neal Phillips, Barrow family friend, and my collaborator, Jonathan Davis, and many other private researchers, today it’s possible to put together a clearer picture of the two young people who became the most famous outlaw couple of the twentieth century.

  This book is certainly not the last word on the famous pair, just the next one. At this writing, a recently discovered manuscript, written by Blanche Barrow while she was in prison, is being edited and prepared for publication. When it becomes public, things in this book and others will surely have to be changed as we get Blanche’s own version of her time with Bonnie and Clyde and we are able to fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle.

  —James R. Knight

  Franklin, Tennessee

  This project began with a meeting, instigated by Sandy Jones, between myself and Jonathan Davis, in a hotel lobby in Fort Worth, Texas. Marie Barrow Scom
a’s stories of her early years, and the Barrow family’s experiences during the time that Clyde Barrow was a wanted man, recorded by Mr. Davis, became the foundation for the early chapters of this book. As the story came to the point that the lives of the people involved entered the public record, however, the help of many other people became necessary.

  After Bonnie and Clyde became public figures, the best and most detailed accounts of their exploits often came from the pages of small-town newspapers. These stories were written down within hours of the actual events and usually included interviews with participants who had no idea they were dealing with the Barrow Gang. Finding these stories was the trick, and without the librarians and volunteers in places like Storm Lake, Perry, Spencer, and Fort Dodge, Iowa; Marshall, Temple, Sherman, Eastland, Mabank, Kaufman, Denton, and Waco, Texas; Enid and Commerce, Oklahoma; Ruston, Louisiana; Joplin, Springfield, and Carthage Missouri; Fort Smith and Fayetteville, Arkansas; and several others, it would have been impossible. These folks were generous and helpful to an unknown researcher who, many times, was just a voice on the phone. Thank you all.

  From the start, I knew that pictures were going to be an important part of the story, and the ones seen here came from several sources. The excellent facilities of the Dallas Public Library and the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco provided many of the classic but seldom seen images. Others came from private collections. I’d like to especially thank Sandy Jones, Bob Fischer, Renay Stanard, Rick Mattix, Pat McConal, Harrison Hamer, and Phillip Steele for the photographs they provided.

  History is sometimes hard to recognize as you see it happening. The eyewitnesses provided a unique perspective, and I’d like to thank them all for the willingness to talk to a stranger—Roy Ferguson, whose car battery was almost stolen; Clemie Booker Methvin, who fed Clyde and a slightly drunk Bonnie supper and knew many of the people involved in Bienville Parish, Louisiana; Gladys Cartwright, who was shot in the hand; Velma Humphrey and Walter Patton Jr., who told me the story of the killing of their father and uncle, Henry Humphrey; and my mother, Hilda Farris Knight, and my uncle, William S. Farris, who saw Buck and W. D. Jones drive past their house.

  Finally, there were several people who are authorities in this and related fields whom I went to for help more than once. I’d like to thank Sandy Jones, gangster artifacts collector and 1934 Ford V-8 expert; Jonathan Davis and Buddy Williams for issues pertaining to the Barrow family and Bonnie and Clyde in the Dallas area; Pat McConal for the Eastham escape and Huntsville Prison details; Joe Bauske for the account of the death of W. D. Jones; Sid Underwood for his book on Raymond Hamilton; Brian Beerman for the Okabena robbery story; Rick Mattix and Mike Woltz for details concerning the Barrow gang in Iowa; Carroll Y. Rich for the tale of aftermath of the ambush in Arcadia, Louisiana; and Robert H. Russell for his grandfather’s notes on the harboring trial.

  Finally, for the overall story, I must thank John Neal Phillips. His benchmark work on Ralph Fults and Bonnie and Clyde was constantly open on my desk. The quality and depth of his research meant that, for some incidents in Bonnie and Clyde’s life, there was literally no place else to go. In addition, he personally endured numerous questions, some serious and some foolish; answered many e-mails; and generally was a great help and encouragement. I believe his willingness to help another researcher in the same field is a measure of the well-deserved confidence he has in his own work. On the subject of Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and their families and associates, he is “the man.”

  During the early autumn of 1934, a volume entitled Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker1 appeared in bookstores across America. Bonnie and Clyde were two of the bestknown individuals in the country at that time, due to the fact that their two-year odyssey of crime had reached a violent end on a stretch of rural Louisiana highway a few months earlier. In 1934 many of the best-known public figures in America were fugitives and wanted persons. Besides Bonnie and Clyde, it was the year of John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Face” Nelson, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker gang, with their notorious “Ma.” Fugitives was advertised as being written by Nell Barrow, Clyde’s sister, and Emma Parker, Bonnie’s mother, and compiled by Jan Fortune, a screenwriter.

  In Dallas, sixteen-year-old Marie Francis eagerly awaited the publication of this account of the lives of the outlaw couple. She had been married to Joe Bill Francis for a few months, but her maiden name was Barrow. Clyde was her older brother. Marie, the youngest of the seven Barrow children, along with the rest of her family, had spent the last two years living the story. After all the media attention, police scrutiny, and just plain hype, Marie was hoping that this book would eradicate misconceptions. The Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker she knew weren’t the depraved “mad-dog killers” portrayed in much of the news coverage that followed their two-year career.2

  Marie had no part in the preparation of the new book, so she had to wait until it came out and read it like everyone else. When it did, she was in for a major disappointment. Marie thought the book was more fiction than fact. She was upset and confronted her sister Nell the next time she saw her. Nell said she was just as surprised as Marie about how the book turned out and hadn’t said many of the things that appeared in Fugitives as Barrow family recollections. It was the same with the Parker family: Emma Parker denied having said what Jan Fortune attributed to her.

  True Detective magazine had beaten Fugitives to the newsstands with its six-part series entitled “The Inside Story of Bonnie Parker and the Bloody Barrows.” The publishers of True Detective already had much of the work done on the series and were ready to go to press as soon as they got word that Bonnie and Clyde had been captured or killed. Word came on May 23, 1934, and the first installment of “The Bloody Barrows” appeared in the June issue. Since the Barrow and Parker families deny being the source for a lot of the material in Fugitives, Ms. Fortune must have gotten it from somewhere else. The True Detective series was appearing at the time Fortune was preparing her draft of Fugitives and was about the only thing available at the time that attempted to cover the Barrows’ whole two-year career.3 Regardless of how the families felt about it, since it was the first fulllength treatment of their lives, Fugitives (and, by extension, True Detective) became an authoritative and primary source for much of what has been written since about “the Barrow gang.”

  As inaccurate as Marie felt Ms. Fortune’s book was, she believed that some of the works that followed it were even worse.4 Marie noted that the people who have written about her brothers and family over the years didn’t go to enough effort to find what she considered the real story, but just relied on those who had gone before them. Few of them actually knew the real people behind the headlines or, until recently, even contacted the Barrow or Parker families.5

  Unfortunately, Marie Barrow and others over the years have left the impression that almost nothing in Fugitives can be trusted. Looking back, we can certainly spot many errors, but recent research has also shown that the book is more accurate—in some places—than previously believed.6 Whatever is true about the accuracy of the story told in Jan Fortune’s book, one thing is certain. It was the beginning of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde.

  In September 1934, when Fugitives came out, the public image of the pair of outlaw lovers from Dallas was anything but glamorous. They had, after all, eluded and embarrassed lawmen in more than a dozen states for over two years. Nine policemen and three civilians were dead because of them in robberies, gunfights, and jailbreaks. When the couple was finally betrayed and died in a hail of bullets on a country road, many people thought that they got what they deserved.

  Until Fugitives appeared, almost everything written about Bonnie and Clyde was from the point of view of the press and the authorities.7 In the style of the journalism of the day, they were routinely pictured as depraved, bloodthirsty animals. The authorities certainly weren’t interested in creating any public sympathy, and the press was glad to pick up on any rumor or lurid detail, no matter how ou
tlandish. Times were hard, and those kinds of stories sold newspapers.

  Fugitives, as disappointing as it was to the Barrows, was still the first attempt to tell the story from the family point of view. For the first time, you see Clyde as a normal kid who grew up on a farm, got started in petty crime as a teenager, and finally got caught. You then see him come out of two years in the brutal Texas prison system as a hard case with a hatred of the law, harassed by the local police and almost certain to turn back to crime. You also, for the first time, see Bonnie as a bright, loving, scrappy, headstrong, manipulative, spoiled, homesick girl who was married at fifteen, a deserted wife at seventeen, and a “bored to tears” waitress by nineteen. Then she met a young man who was different from the other boys who tried to date her, and she fell madly in love—having no idea where it would lead.

  Many of the terrible things written about them in the papers were true. Places were robbed, men were killed, and families were deprived of husbands and fathers. While they were alive, it was easier to portray Bonnie and Clyde as entirely evil, bloodthirsty, amoral murderers. Now that they were dead, however, it became possible to begin to show them as complex, contradictory human beings instead of cartoon-character gangsters.

  Bonnie and Clyde’s image as nothing more than thieving, murdering white trash developed over two years. The swing of the pendulum to the other extreme of John Steinbeck–type folk heroes took a little longer. It was, more or less, completed by the 1967 release of the movie starring Warren Beatty as Clyde and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie. The movie was nominated for several Oscars, and 1930s clothes became the current fashion. Playboy Magazine even ran an interview with a former gang member, done by a Houston reporter. In many ways, though, the good-looking, good-natured, good-hearted, fast-shooting hillbillies of the 1967 movie were just as unreal as the cold-hearted killers of the 1934 newspapers.

  Thankfully, the pendulum has moved back toward the middle. In the last twenty years, some authors have finally begun to research this famous outlaw couple with the level of scholarship that true historical figures deserve.