Bonnie and Clyde
Few criminals have
fired imaginations like Bonnie and Clyde.
A multitude of books, an academy award winning movie and a 1967
chart-topping song have told their story for over seventy years. Often viewed as a romantic pair of Robin
Hoods, their lives were anything but.
They were constantly on the dodge, lived out of stolen cars, and made
little from their holdups. Even worse,
innocent people were killed. As their
notoriety grew, they were always recognized, forcing them to avoid family and
friends for extended periods. After a
four year crime spree (1931-1934), it all came to a gruesome end, brought about
by an unrelenting Texas Ranger.
Clyde
Barrow was born to a sharecropper family seeking a better way of life. The Barrows settled in West Dallas, an
extremely poor community during the Depression Era. Homeless, the Barrows lived under their wagon
until they could afford a more commodious abode - a tent. With little work available, young men turned
to crime instead. Clyde started his life
of crime while still a child, going from petty theft to robbery before he
turned twenty. A stint at the Eastham
State Prison Farm, near Huntsville, stoked his criminal behavior rather than
rehabilitate it. The guards beat him
unmercifully and one inmate named “Big Ed” raped him. In a blind fury, Clyde dispatched Ed with a
pipe, but was not charged for the murder.
Eager to get out of the grinding work details, he had a fellow
prisoner chop off two of his toes with an ax.
Ironically, through the efforts of his mother, Clyde was paroled shortly
after he lost his toes. During a visit
to a friend’s house in Dallas, he met the love of his violent life, Bonnie
Parker.
Bonnie
Parker also grew up in West Dallas. Her
family residence was in Cement City, a factory town dominated by a large cement
factory that emitted clouds of choking gray dust. Unlike her future boyfriend Clyde, Bonnie was
a gentle soul who liked to write poetry.
She was lauded by her teachers for her good grades and sweet
attitude. Pretty and petite, it would
seem Bonnie was destined for a better life.
The environs of West Dallas dictated otherwise. Her dad, a bricklayer, died when she was
young, leaving her mom destitute. Bonnie
had to wait tables to help her out. At
sixteen, she married a petty criminal, who abandoned her for long stretches
while pursuing his profession. Because
of her own criminal life, she never got around to divorcing him. Photos of Bonnie, found at a Barrow Gang
hideout in Joplin, Missouri, shows her posing with a variety of firearms while
smoking a cigar. Bonnie was never that
manly; she only smoked cigarettes.
Former gang members have stated she never fired a gun at the police.
Bonnie
and Clyde were attracted to each other the moment they met. She stayed with him throughout their four
year spree. Along with Clyde’s brother,
Buck, and Buck’s wife, Blanch, they robbed a number of small town stores and
gas stations, shooting those that got in their way. When feasible, they robbed small town banks,
though their take wasn’t much. The
Depression kept those banks to a very minimal cash reserve - $3,000 or
less. Before their demise, the Barrow
Gang killed 12 men; most of them were in law enforcement. They traveled as far north as Minnesota, with
brief stops in Joplin and Platte City, Missouri. At both places, they fled after shootouts
with the local police. Buck was killed
from a gunshot wound to the head.
Blanche lost an eye and was captured. Bonnie’s legs were severely burned when Clyde,
ignoring a warning sign, drove their car off a riverbank. Applications of sodium bicarbonate (baking
soda) saved her legs and probably her life.
Under-budgeted
police and sheriff departments couldn’t match Bonnie and Clyde’s firepower. Clyde kept his gang well armed with automatic
rifles stolen from state guard armories.
His favorite was the Browning automatic rifle, later used as a light
machine gun during World War II. To make matters worse, they couldn’t give
chase beyond their own jurisdictions, making it difficult to apprehend
them. Outgunned and outdistanced, a new
approach was needed. The impetus came
from two events: a daring prison
breakout, engineered by Clyde, which freed several convicts from Eastham, and
the deaths of two Grapevine patrol officers gunned down by Clyde. Under mounting pressure from the public,
Texas’ first female governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, assigned Texas Ranger Frank
Hamer the job of bringing down Bonnie and Clyde.
Frank
Hamer was an old school ranger, more at home on the back of a horse than a police
car seat. As a city marshal, he cleaned
up the Texas boomtown of Navasota. The
town was so violent; a hundred men had been gunned down on the main street
within a year. As a Texas Ranger, he
took on bootleggers and the Klu Klux Klan, preventing 15 lynchings. As his tough guy image grew, Hamer could
clear the streets of an angry mob with one simple command - “Git !”
Frank Hammer
After
his appointment, Hamer formed a detail of four hardened law enforcement veterans. He knew that in order to catch the ever
moving crime duo, you had to live like they did. That entailed endless driving, camping
outdoors, and long periods away from their homes, just like an Old West
posse. Hamer’s posse included Manny
Gault, of the Texas Highway Patrol, Bob Alcon, of the Dallas County Sheriff’s
Dept., and Ted Hinton, of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. Hinton had grown up in West Dallas and knew
the Barrow family. Bob Alcorn had been
waited on by Bonnie during her stints as a cafe waitress. After months on the
road, they finally tracked Bonnie and Clyde to Bienville Parish, Louisiana, the
home of one of their gang members, Henry Methvin.
Hamer noticed the crime duo followed a
familiar pattern during their years of crime; they tended to stay close to
county and state boundary lines. By
doing this, they could evade local law enforcement by simply crossing over
jurisdiction lines. In addition, they
routinely stopped to visit their families and those of their gang members. Hamer knew about the family visits and was
informed in Shreveport that Bonnie and Clyde were due to visit the Methvin home
at Gibsland, a remote town in Bienville Parish.
Hamer added Bienville Parish sheriff, Henderson Jordan,
and his deputy, Prentiss Oakey, to his posse. With the assistance of Henry Methvin’s
father, Ivy, an ambush was set up along a road near the Methvin home. Posse members disagree on whether or not a
deal was made with Ivy - a lighter sentence for his son in return for his
cooperation. Nevertheless, Ivy’s truck
was parked off the side of the road as bait for the ambush. Thinking Ivy’s truck was broken down, Clyde
would stop to help. Hamer would then make his
move.
On
May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were driving a stolen Ford Sedan when they
spotted Ivy’s truck. Bonnie was eating a
sandwich with a map on her lap. Clyde
was driving in his stocking feet with a shotgun between his legs. They stopped.
From there, the accounts differ on what happened next. Were Bonnie and Clyde told they were under arrest
before the shooting began? Tired of the
chase and the government pressure, it would seem doubtful Hamer would leave
anything to chance. Considering the past
gunfights Clyde was involved in, it was also doubtful he would have peacefully
surrendered. A hailstorm of bullets hit
Clyde’s car. Bonnie and Clyde were
riddled from head to toe. Bonnie’s nose
and lower jaw were almost shot away, leaving her distorted mouth full of broken
teeth. What happened next was a festival
of the grotesque.
Instead
of using discretion, the bullet-riddled car, with Bonnie and Clyde still
inside, was towed to a furniture store in Arcadia that doubled as a funeral
home. Because of the eight mile distance
to Arcadia, a faulty tow truck, and overheard phone calls from Hamer to Texas
law enforcement officials, word spread like wildfire about the ambush. Morbidly curious, a mob gathered outside of
the Conger Furniture Store. At one
point, the tow truck broke down in front of a Gibsland elementary school. School children ran out to view the car and
its ghastly contents. Needless to say,
they recoiled in horror. One of the
students fainted. It only grew worse
from there; a tightly packed crowd surrounded the car when it reached the
furniture store. Beer and sandwiches
were sold at inflated prices to the crowd.
Ladies dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood, bits of bloody hair were
snipped from the corpses, and one man tried to cut off one of Clyde’s ears
while another tried to saw off a finger.
Laid out inside the store's mortuary, the bodies were almost too riddled
to be embalmed. Bonnie and Clyde were
laid to rest at separate cemeteries in Dallas.
Clyde Barrow’s funeral was one of the largest attended in Dallas
history. At the time of their deaths,
Bonnie was only twenty-three years old.
Clyde was twenty-five.
After
the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, Hamer, along with twenty rangers, prevented
sabotage during the 1935 Gulf Coast longshoremen’s strike. Next to the Bonnie and Clyde ambush, Hamer’s
most controversial role came when he accompanied Governor Coke Stevenson, who
had just lost a tight Congressional race, to Alice, Texas in the notoriously
corrupt Jim Wells County. Hamer told an
armed crowd of locals to get lost while the tally seats were examined for
fraud, especially the votes from a mysterious Precinct 13 ballot box. Although the box was stuffed with over three
hundred nonexistent voters, Stephenson’s opponent still won the election. The opponent was Lyndon B. Johnson. Hamer died on July 10, 1955 from the effects
of a stroke two years earlier. He was
buried near his son, who was killed at Iwo Jima, at Memorial Park Cemetery in
Austin.
